Question

Research Agile project management. Write a paper (4-5 pages) with your research results. Submit to the Dropbox.In your research answer the following questions:1. Define and describe the method/environment.2. Describe how and why the method/environment evolved.3. Describe how the method/environment is different from traditional project methods/environments (ie. Waterfall). 4. Describe the challenges of the method/environment.5. Describe success factors for the method/environment.6. Find an organization using this method and describe how it has been successful and what some of the challenges are. Use an organization not mentioned in the textbook.Be sure to use APA guidelines in citing works within the text and the reference list at the end of the document.

Answer 1

RESEARCH AGILE PROJECTMANAGEMENT

Agile development, or agile project management, is an iterative and incremental method of managing the design and build activities for engineering, information technology, and new product or service development projects, for example agile software development. It requires capable individuals from the relevant business, with supplier and customer input to work in a highly collaborative manner, in small stages, to complete small portions of the deliverables in each delivery cycle (iteration), and where possible deploying deliverables to live (increment) to achieve value and real feedback, whilst iterative methods evolve the entire set of deliverables over time, completing them near the end of the project. The end result is a product that best meets current customer needs and is delivered with minimal costs, waste, and time, as the iterations encourage feedback and review, so achieving benefits earlier than via traditional approaches. There is a large body of literature describing various agile methodology tools and techniques and some research into its adoption. However, most usage occurs in software development and innovation. Many companies have considered its adoption in response to habitual failure of IT delivery from more traditional project management approaches.

Agile project management is an iterative approach to delivering a project throughout its life cycle.Iterative or agile life cycles are composed of several iterations or incremental steps towards the completion of a project. Iterative approaches are frequently used in software development projects to promote velocity and adaptability since the benefit of iteration is that you can adjust as you go along rather than following a linear path. One of the aims of an agile or iterative approach is to release benefits throughout the process rather than only at the end. At the core, agile projects should exhibit central values and behaviours of trust, flexibility, empowerment and collaboration.

The principles of an agile way of working:

The agile philosophy concentrates on empowered people and their interactions and early and constant delivery of value into an enterprise.Agile project management focuses on delivering maximum value against business priorities in the time and budget allowed, especially when the drive to deliver is greater than the risk. Principles include:

• The project breaks a requirement into smaller pieces, which are then prioritised by the team in terms of importance.
• The agile project promotes collaborative working, especially with the customer.
• The agile project reflects, learns and adjusts at regular intervals to ensure that the customer is always satisfied and is provided with outcomes that result in benefits.
• Agile methods integrate planning with execution, allowing an organisation to create a working mindset that helps a team respond effectively to changing requirements.  
• Agile methods

• Agile does not prescribe a way of working. Rather it provides a framework which describes a collection of tools, structure, culture and discipline to enable a project or programme to embrace changes in requirements.

• Agile methods integrate planning with execution, allowing an organisation to create a working mindset that helps a team respond effectively to these changing requirements.

• The agile project promotes collaborative working, especially with the customer. This involves the customer being embedded in the team, providing the team with constant and regular feedback on deliverables and functionality of the end product.
• The best agile approaches are very disciplined and can, and should, be integrated into corporate procedures such as governance.

• Popular agile methods

  There are several methodolo

  Where traditional project management will establish a detailed plan and detailed requirements at the start then attempt to follow the plan, agile starts work with a rough idea of what is required and by delivering something in a short period of time, clarifies the requirements as the project progresses.

  These frequent iterative processes are a core characteristic of an agile project and, because of this way of working, collaborative relationships are established between stakeholders and the team members delivering the work

• Difference between agile and waterfall approaches to project management

• There are four principles which are typically used to highlight the difference between agile and waterfall (or more traditional) approaches to project management:

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation;
• Individuals and interaction over process and tools;
• Responding to change over following a structured plan;
• Prototyping/working solutions over comprehensive documentation.

• Traditional 'waterfall’ approaches will tend to treat scope as the driver and calculate the consequential time and cost; whereas ‘agile’ commits set resources over limited periods to deliver products that are developed over successive cycles.

  Agile and waterfall approaches to project management exist on a continuum of techniques that should be adopted as appropriate to the goals of the project and the organisational culture of the delivery environment.

  Overall, agile and waterfall approaches to project management both bring strengths and weaknesses to project delivery, and professionals should adopt a ‘golf-bag’ approach to selecting the right techniques that best suit the project, the project environment and the contracting parties with an emphasis on the behaviours, leadership and governance, rather than methods, that create the best opportunities for successful project delivery.

  Pros and cons from The Practical Adoption of Agile Methodologies:

  

  Challenges to applying an agile project management methodology

• Project managers use their own experience to pick and choose the best methods and practices, whatever the methodology and adapt them to their specific delivery. Adrian Malone of the APM Specific Interest Group on knowledge management states that project managers can create the right environment and provide appropriate tools for people and teams to collaborate in the creation and sharing of knowledge. A relatively new trend is the use of social media in project teams. PM 2.0 documents the possible use of social media in project management to improve team working, stakeholder management and communication. Where agile is adopted across functions, team and geographies, use of social media and information sharing tools is vital, so a factor in practical adoption is team location and mitigations if not co-located. The benefits of using social media for broad stakeholder management is based on the reach, allowing any and all interested parties to track progress and receive updates or even request further information that may not necessarily have been caught by more traditional stakeholder management methods. Any subsequent reduction in ‘noise’ will help build towards the perception of success. The key difference is that information and the voice of the customer is therefore in real time so can be a useful additional to a project manager’s communications toolset. Daim et al (2011) investigates the use of technology, specifically e-collaboration and community platform tools, in global virtual teams. Tools such as wikis and blogs are used to neutralise some of the issues around virtual teams working across time zones, as well as individualise services. Unfortunately, there is a lack of research papers, as authors practise what they preach and publish via blogs or focus on broader social media trends such as the interactive workplace, rather than specific project usage; evidence needs to be gathered as to how well these tools and techniques (such as wikis, Sharepoint, Facebook, Twitter) are used and their impact on project succes

• Conclusions

• The participants represented a broad range of project management experience, styles and project scales, but the drivers for selecting agile as a methodology were the same: either a need for speed, a fixed budget with uncertain requirements but clear benefits/outcome, or a willingness to pilot and prototype. However, the projects delivered by the participants in an agile methodology were predominantly information technology solutions. This could be due to some membership or network bias, or could be indicative of a lack of adoption for wider project deliveries. All participants identified key success factors: Project management maturity and culture of project management to understand roles and expected behaviours. An agreed time commitment from client/customer is critical. Co-location or ability to meet regularly face to face as a team. Investment in training and team building. They noted that many project management principles are the same, regardless of methodology, but more relevant to agile are communications methods, experienced team members, co-location and senior management buy in. However, agile is perceived to take more initial effort to get the best conditions, such as that colocation, a full range of skillsets in the team, full time not part time resourcing. Also, that the agile principle of servant leader also applies to the project manager, not just to the scrum master. With one exception, participants all blended methods from the range of agile methodologies, but the majority used a basis of scrum, (as XP seems to have been popular earlier in the adoption trend). And one is moving from scrum towards kanban. The participants adaptations broke down into three areas: 1. Artefacts consistent as a minimum set were a product backlog, sprint planning sessions, sprints, daily meetings and retrospectives. 2. Where adaptations were made, it was mainly to sprints duration, but the consensus on an ideal duration was two to four weeks, several had used a business analyst as the client, and what was tracked and in what format was particular to each organisation, so tracking metrics were adapted (but always needed, even if not a classic burndown chart). 3. Peer programming had a limited adoption. A key learning point was to design up front how to integrate with legacy methodologies, manage governance for mixed methodologies across a company, and how to organise multiple workstreams, whether split by project, functionality or simply to make teams an effective size. All had had some positive experience and would use agile again, as it does deliver early benefit, for less money. None of the participants would use agile for regulatory or safety changes, or where a stable environment has clear set of requirements.

• References

• Agarwal, N. & Rathod, N (2006) “Defining sucess for software projects: an exploratory revelation”, International Journal of project management 24 pp 358-370. Almeida,

• L.F.M, Conforto, E.C>, Silva, L.S. & Amarl, D.>C (2012) “Critical factors in Agile projects for new product developments” Produto & Producao, 13(1) p. 93-113.

• Ashurst, C., & Doherty, N (2004) “Towards the formulation of a “Best practice” framework for benefits realisation in IT projects”. Electronic Journal of Information systems evaluation, paper 1, issue 2.

• Baccarini, D (1999) “The logical framework method for defining project success” Project Management Journal, December

• Conforto, E, Salum F, Amaral D, Luis da Silva LS, de Almeida LFM (2014) “Can Agile project management be adopted by industries other than software development?”, Project Management Journal June/ July 2014, pp21-34

• Daim, T.U., Ha A, Reutiman, S, Hughes B, pathak U, Bynum W, Bhatla A (2012), “Exploring the communication breakdown in global virtual teams”, International Journal of project management 30, pp 199-212

• De Wit, A (1988) “Measurement of project success” Butterworth & Co Ltd 0263-7863/88/030164-07

• Doherty, N.F. & King, M., (2001) “An investigation of the factors affecting the successful treatment of organizational issues in systems development projects”. European Information Systems, 10.

• Dvir, D., Sadeh A, Malach-Fines, A (2006) “Projects and project managers: the relationship between project manager’s personality, project types and project success”, Project Management Journal, December.

• Dvorak, R.R., Holen, E., Mark D, & Meehan III, W.F. (1997) “Six principles of high-performance IT” The McKinsey Quarterly Number 3. Earl, M.J., (1989) “