Chapter 12. Agile (Adaptive) Project Management
12.5 Key Takeaways
Key Takeaways
- The Agile project management approach has been utilized by project teams since the 1990s, when it started to emerge among software developers.
- In 2001, agile practitioners published a manifesto titled “Manifesto for Agile Software Development ” that proposed a set of guiding principles for agile project management.
- The Agile manifesto highlights the importance of “individuals and interactions,” “working software,” “customer collaboration,” and “responding to change” to distinguish itself from the traditional waterfall (predictive) project management approach.
- While the waterfall approach is linear and sequential, the agile approach compresses the sequential phases in small timeboxes (iterations) to create increments at the end of each timebox.
- The main roles of agile teams are cross-functional teams and their members, product owners, and team facilitators.
- Common agile practices are the team charter, user stories and backlog, planning of each iteration or cycle, daily standups, demonstrations or reviews, retrospectives, and backlog refinement.
- The structure of a user story is generally as follows: As a “user/stakeholder,” I want to “perform a function / an action / an app feature” so that I can “acquire a benefit / an expected outcome.”
- The Agile Practice Guide by PMI (Project Management Institute) lists the single-team agile methods as Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Kanban, Crystal methods, Scrumban, Feature-Driven Development (FDD), Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), and Agile Unified Process (AgileUP).
- According to the 15th State of Agile Report published in 2021, the SAFe® (Scaled Agile Framework) is the most common scaling framework. It focuses on providing a knowledge base of patterns for scaling development work across all enterprise levels.
