The traditional 'waterfall' approach to managing projects and change is typically associated with a number of problems:
- Spending too much time up front gathering detailed requirements, only to find that users don't have a full understanding of these yet, so they keep changing their minds. Any 'scope creep' is then considered detrimental to the project
- A 'them' and 'us' culture can exist between those delivering the project and those at the receiving end
- There can be a long time lag between initiating the project and users actually seeing something delivered
 We often hear about these sorts of problems with projects - leading to frustration, uneasiness and a general lack of confidence. It can feel very stressful and an uphill struggle.
Does this sound familiar....?
So, what about Agile?
When I first came across Agile, I was sceptical about it, worrying that more flexibility meant a lack of control. But flexibility is exactly what is needed these days. We know that things are changing all the time, so how can we possibly pin down all the requirements up front! Agile offers a way to respond to change as it happens, whilst retaining control over the project.
The Agile Project Management Practitioner qualification is based on the DSDM Atern framework. This covers the whole project lifecycle and ensures that we have the rigour we need to establish a firm foundation and clear boundaries. It also offers flexibility, which is how it addresses many of the concerns of a more traditional project management (PM) approach. This is good news for users, as they can work out the details as they go along, ensuring the emphasis remains on what is good for the business.
 This is a more realistic and practical way of working. If you were planning a world trip, you wouldn't really want to set out a detailed itinerary for every day of your trip. What if you wanted to change your mind based on the new things you discover along the way? With a more agile approach, you could first just decide on the countries and cities to visit and then work out the detail as you go.
The idea is to get a working solution which benefits the business as soon as possible. You may not get all the bells and whistles, - but if these have limited benefit, are they really needed? Think of the amount of functions you have on your TV remote control. How many of those buttons do you actually use and get benefit from?
So is Agile all good, or does it carry challenges of its own?
Agile focuses on delivering benefit to the business early, so projects will tend to deliver in phases, rather than all at once at the end. There is an overhead involved with this, in that each 'deployment' needs support to make it happen, and when the next phase is delivered it needs integrating with the previous deployment. So it's important to consider how to approach a phased delivery, to ensure that the benefits will outweigh the overhead of doing it this way.
Another thing to be aware of is that Agile requires a different culture, where there is much more collaboration between the business and those delivering projects -everyone involved needs to work closely together. Also the style of project management is not directive; instead the project manager has a more facilitative style of working with an empowered team. The right environment or culture needs to be in place so the empowered team can get on with their work.
With traditional project management, senior managers, teams, and users, are used to knowing precisely what they'll get up front and this won't happen with an Agile approach - the detail will evolve as you go along. Being comfortable with this may need a change in mindset.
These things present challenges to running projects in an Agile way and need to be acknowledged and addressed if an Agile process is going to work well. If the company hasn't bought into this, there will be a tendency to revert back to a traditional way of working.
Agile isn't perfect. Like any useful approach, it needs to be applied with consideration. For me, it's not a replacement for traditional project management, but is an invaluable alternative that is likely to produce better results and gain more benefit for the business in our complex modern world.
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