What is Agile Project Management and Its Phases?

What is Agile Project Management?

Agile project management is an adaptive method of product development. It takes into account the iterative and incremental approaches of developing and delivering products to the customer. The focus of agile project management is on value creation and customer centricity. The other important aspects of agile project management are: its responsive nature to the changing requirements, its progressive outlook toward software planning, and leadership shift from command & control to servant leadership.

The scope of some of the projects is well-defined and certain. The traditional or waterfall model of managing the projects is used in such scenarios. The scope of some of the projects is uncertain, ambiguous, volatile and complex. The very nature of agile project management makes it complimentary to execute such uncertain projects. Project Management is a vast subject and involves many new concepts, processes, and tools. This PMP Certification Training Program involves comprehensive class activities based on real-life scenarios to help you understand the concepts well so that you can answer the PMP exam questions well as well as use these in your job.

5 Phases In Agile project management

Envision

This phase can be considered equivalent to the initiating process group in traditional project management. It helps create vision for the project. The vision focuses on the customers and the stakeholders involved in the project. It covers the why, what, how, and who of the project. It defines the product vision, scope, constraints, delivery methodology, and the stakeholders. 

Speculate

This phase can be considered equivalent to the planning process group in traditional project management. This phase expands the envision phase and encourages brainstorming, critical thinking, creative thinking, and collaboration to plan the execution of the project. It translates the product vision into product roadmap, to release level planning and iteration level planning. It determines the workload, product features, estimation, risks, and delivery. 

Explore

This phase can be considered equivalent to the executing process group in traditional project management. It focuses on following the release/iteration plan (as prepared in the previous phase 2 called Speculate) and delivering project features; more specifically delivering potentially shippable products. 

Adapt

This phase can be considered equivalent to the monitoring & controlling process group in traditional project management. This phase focuses on inspection, supervising, modifications, changes, and corrections in the project lifecycle.  The phases Speculate, Explore and Adapt are regularly revisited in order to improve the product delivery and project execution in each and every iteration. This means reviewing actual results versus planned results. This phase covers the improvements needed which are integrated into the next iteration. 

Close

This phase can be considered equivalent to the Closure Process Group in traditional project management. Per the definition of a project given in PMBOK, it has a definite start and a definite end. The expectations of the customers are set at the onset of the project about the endpoint of the project. Not doing so would result in the perception issues among the customers which would result in unnecessary fall-outs. Doing it right, would help celebrate the success of the project. However, before the team ends the project, ensure to analyze all the key findings, knowledge gathered, and lessons learned and pass these along to the next team so that they can benefit.

Agile Mindset & Manifesto:

The agile project management methodologies like Extreme Programming, SCRUM, DSDM, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development, Pragmatic Programming, were already existing before the agile movement was formalized in 2001 with the publication of the agile manifesto for agile software development.

The original seventeen authors signed a manifesto which contained 4 values and 12 principles. The manifesto stated that:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Four Values

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan

Twelve Principles

1. The highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development
3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months
4. Stakeholders and developers must collaborate on a daily basis
5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
6. Face-to-face meetings are deemed the most efficient and effective format for project success
7. A final working product is the ultimate measure of progress
8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility
10. Simplicity, maximizing the work not done, is an essential element
11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams
12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly

As per agile practice guide of PMI, agile is a mindset defined by values, guided by principles, and manifested through many different practices.

Characteristics of Agile Life Cycle for product development

The creation of agile manifesto started to simply product development in software industry. However, the characteristics of agile methodologies have made its impact on almost all the industries. The agile way of managing projects is not restricted to software industry only. It is critical to understand that the following characteristics are intrinsic to all kinds of projects, whether they follow predictive or agile (adaptive) life cycles. The focus here is on the attributes specific to the project characteristics managed in agile manner. These characteristics and their attributes are mentioned below.

• Requirements: The projects which are managed in an agile manner have an intrinsic characteristic of dynamism. The requirements and eventually the scope change occur often and to incorporate such kind of changes, agile and adaptive methodologies are adopted.
• Activities: One of the other most important characteristics of agile project management that the activities are repeated until near perfect solution is achieved. This can be referred to as iterative approach of creating product.
• Delivery: The delivery of products/features in agile methodology is done frequently with incremental deliveries. This delivery is potentially shippable product. This is related to incremental way of delivering product.
• Goal: The goal of agile project management is to deliver value to the customers via frequent delivery by incorporating early feedback.

In general, agile life cycle uses the project characteristics of both iterative and incremental life cycles, i.e., the project team iterate to create the product incrementally. This ensures that the team gets the visibility of the project and gain early feedback from the customer. 

Agile Roles

There are three major roles defined in the agile way of managing projects.

1. Cross Functional Team members: The cross functional teams are also called as the development teams and are the most critical. Agile teams comprise dedicated team members. Cross functional teams consist of team members with all the skills necessary to produce a working product. The cross functional development teams consist of professionals who deliver potentially releasable product in time-boxed frame. They deliver finished work in the shortest possible time, with higher quality, without external dependencies. The teams are mostly collocated or the team members have the ability to manage any challenges based on location. The teams consist of generalists and specialists and usually work in a stable environment. Agile teams are self-organizing and they themselves decide how to best accomplish their work for each sprint. 

2. Scrum Master: This role can also be associated with the role of servant leader. This can also be called a project manager, team lead, team coach, team facilitator, or process facilitator. The basic and foremost responsibility of this role is to remove impediments, blockers and barriers during the project execution. This ensures that the sprint stays on track by monitoring progress and facilitating meetings. The servant leaders become teams’ advocate and help them communicate with the stakeholders. All agile teams need servant leadership on the team. People need time to build their servant leadership skills of facilitation, coaching, and impediment removal. 

3. Product owner: The product owner represents the voice of customers or users. She helps define the product roadmap, backlog, release plans and goals of each iteration. She ranks the work based on the business value of the features and product. She acts like a lighthouse for guiding the direction of the product. She works with the teams daily by providing feedback and direction of future releases. Sometimes, she requests help from people with deep domain expertise, such as architects, or deep customer expertise, such as product managers. Product owners need to be trained on how to organize and manage the flow of work through the team.

Common Agile Ceremonies

The ceremonies in agile project management methodologies are events. Some of these events are planning-based and some of them are feedback-based events. The ceremonies are:

1. Backlog Preparation: An ordered list of work in agile methodology is called as the backlog. This backlog is presented in story form so that the teams can understand it. The backlog preparation takes the form of progressive elaboration and in this agile way of managing project, there is no need to create all of the stories for the entire project before the work starts—only enough to understand the first release. Product owners might produce a product roadmap to show the anticipated sequence of deliverables over time. The product owner replans the roadmap based on what the team produces. The backlog preparation is one of the layers of the Agile Planning Onion; it is the third layer in the onion. In this, the strategy forms the topmost layer, followed by portfolio, product, release, iteration and daily.

2. Backlog Refinement: The product owner works with the team to prepare some stories for upcoming iteration in the middle of the iteration. The reason for such meetings is to refine enough stories so the team understands these stories and compare them with other stories in the backlog. These meetings help the team understand the potential challenges or problems in the story. The teams can use spike to understand the risk.  There is no consensus on how long the refinement should be.

3. Daily Stand-ups: The ultimate goal of daily stand-up meetings is to ensure that all the members of the team are on the same understanding of the project and its progress. The members use this meeting to commit to each other, share problems, and ensure a smooth workflow. This meeting is timeboxed for no longer than 15 minutes. During this meeting, everyone answers the following questions:

• What did I complete since the last stand-up?
• What am I planning to complete between now and the next stand-up?
• What are my impediments (or risks or problems)?

It is the responsibility of the process owner to not let the daily stand-up meetings become status meetings. Besides this, let this meeting not become a problem solving event.

4. Demonstrations/Reviews: This ceremony helps periodically demonstrate the working product to the customer. This event helps the team gain early feedback on the features (in the form of user stories) of the product. Since the product owner represents the voice of customers or uses, it is her responsibility to check the demonstration and either accept or reject the user stories. As a general guideline, demonstrations happen at least once every 2 weeks. Demonstrations help the teams to set in the right direction if they are progressing in the wrong direction. This becomes a basic component of agile projects (incremental delivery based on iteration/flow). The ceremony of demonstration/review refers to the principle # 7 of Agile Manifesto.

5. Retrospectives: Principle # 12 of Agile Manifesto is: “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.” Post demonstration/review ceremony, the iteration asks for a meeting which would help team understand the improvement areas, correction areas, and the behaviours, actions and work to keep for the next iterations. In general, the team looks back to learn, contemplate, improve and adapt to the best practices. Teams need to learn about the product and/or process. The meeting is all about looking at the qualitative (people’s feelings) data and quantitative (measurements) data to uncover the root causes, developing contingencies, mitigation strategies, and action plans.

Conclusion

The management of projects in agile manner reflects non-traditional ways of executing projects. It embodies the 4 values and 12 principles as laid down in the agile manifesto. The 5 ceremonies compliment the effective and efficient ways of delivering values to the stakeholders which in turn takes the holistic approach of 5 phases of agile project management.

About The Author

Techcanvass is an Information Technology certifications training Organization for professionals. It offers internationally recognized certifications in the fields of Project Management and Business Analysis. It is a premier Authorized training partner (ATP) of Project Management Institute (PMI), USA and a premier Endorsed Education Provider (EEP) of International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA), Canada. Founded by IT professionals, Techcanvass is committed to making learning a more structured, practical and goal-oriented exercise. We also provide consulting services in the fields of Project management and Business Analysis.