Why the Agile methodologies are more and more adapted to today’s projects ?

What’s agility ?

Let’s begin by the 4 values identified in the Agile Manifesto written by 17 experts and consulting IT. Among them there were inventor of Scrum, eXtreme Programming, Crystal Clear, wiki.

This doesn’t mean process, tools, documentation, contract and plan are not important for the project. This means, they could be part of the project but they shouldn’t be considered as the main objectives.

What does agility in project management mean?

Traditional methodology vs agile methodology

The main goal of a project is to get the service or the product expected — →The target.

The traditional approaches such as the cascades or V cycle lead decidedly to a tunnel effect with bad consequences for the project and your client relationship.

In contrary to an Agile approach in which the objectives are constantly discussed and the results tangible through an iterative and incremental process.

How can we ensure to hit this target ?

Some questions we can ask to correct the shot:

• Are the things we talked about last week still valuable and expected ?
• Do we have enough information to provide the feature expected ?
• Will this feature bring value to the product ?
• Any others questions to ensure the objective is reachable, valuable and meet the expectations of the client.

Why I am thinking the project management behaviour is changing ?

Current society behaviour vs traditional methodology

Traditional methodology

• Consists of working on a complete and heavy specification document to describe a project before starting its building phase.
• It’s necessary to have all the elements and all the answers about how the product should behave in order to provide this complete specification document.
• It generally involves a lot of skilled labour and a lot of time to build this document, which is quite difficult to change once the production phase has started.

Society behaviour

It’s well known Human beings are constantly changing their habits. Everything changes so fast around us. Let’s consider:

• Technology and the way we use it, evolves and changes frequently.
• Employment: Nowadays hardly anyone spends his whole career doing the same job or staying in the same company.
• Friends and life partner: How many friends, true friends, do you really have ? How many people around you are changing their partner ? Needless to say we don’t have the same manners as our elders on these topics.
• Most people want to have the freedom of choice (mobile plan, electricity provider,…) no one wants a subscription with commitment.
• Even the tools and services we use today give us the capacity to change at any time. Most tools offer the possibility of exporting your work in multiple formats (Microsoft, Adobe, email format, banking account, etc…)

It’s almost absurd, but today if you want to attract and keep your customers, you have to give them the ability to leave and change easily.

We are entering an era where change is part of everyday life and has to be taken into account.

This has, without any doubt, an impact on our way to manage projects.

By mixing together the current human behaviour and the way we manage projects, I’m convinced the winning supplier will be the one who can adapt the way he works to the way their customers think and act.

Recently, some experiences have made me question the traditional way of managing a project.

• How can we write the whole specification, predicting the complete behaviour expected by the project, knowing the future is uncertain?
• How can we be sure in advance which part should be built first knowing the company’s strategy and customer demands would change in the coming months ?
• How can we face the current “changing” way of living by writing a “hard” specification document considered as a static reference ?
• Can we limit ourselves to using a traditional methodology which is not adapted to change, to manage projects in this moving world ?

Taking into account above all human parameters, I consider the Agile approach as the most adapted way to manage our projects nowadays. Following the 4 Agile values and using a framework like Scrum should be a good start to begin your next project in an Agile way.

As for the question, “Is the traditional approach still valid to manage projects ?”

I might say: ”Yes it is”

On the question, “Is the traditional approach still adapted to manage projects?”

I would answer: “Be agile now !”