How has agile impacted project management in the past decade?
Jim Highsmith: It has shown there is a range of project types and different strategies. In particular, projects that involve uncertainty, varying requirements and shorter delivery times can benefit from agile methods. Projects in which innovation and experimentation are required—often in conjunction with uncertainty—also need to be managed in a more iterative, product-oriented way rather than a task-oriented manner.
Agile project management embraces both “doing” agile and “being” agile—and the latter is the hardest. It defines a different management style: one of facilitation, collaboration, goal-and boundary-setting, and flexibility.
Finally, agile is changing the way organizations measure success, moving from the traditional iron triangle of scope, schedule and cost to an agile triangle of value, quality and constraints.
Ron Jeffries: More organizations recognize that conventional project management is not the best way for them to do their work. They are finding the assumptions behind conventional project management are not germane to the business of creating value.
In particular, it is common for a project management approach to focus primarily on cost rather than value. It is common to attempt building some defined thing by some defined deadline.
Agile ideas turn both assumptions on their heads. Projects should meet deadlines by controlling scope and should control scope by managing which chunks of value should be included and which should not.
Agile is not about building a plan and working to it. It is not even about building a plan and modifying it as we go. Agile is not about planning at all; it is about choice.
Many companies are learning this. Some project managers are learning it as well.
Andrew Hunt: Agile probably has not impacted project management as much as it should have. Primarily, the agile movement has impacted development and developers more than management and managers. I hope, at least, it has helped point out what project management should be doing—that is, removing those things that are blocking the developers.
Arie van Bennekum: It is not the manifesto but the agile movement that has impacted project management. The big difference is the way you report to clients on progress, do acceptance procedures and create ownership. As a project manager, you do not control a team—you facilitate it. And this team includes end-users.
How has agile evolved during the 10-plus years since the manifesto?
Mr. Highsmith: It has evolved in several different ways:
■ First, early agile projects were smaller and colocated. Now organizations have scaled agile to very large projects that most often are distributed.
■ Second, organizations now focus on agile technical practice in software development and are learning to implement continuous delivery in which new features can be deployed at any time (daily, weekly, etc.).
■ Third, agile software development has evolved into agile project management that covers a wide range of products.
Mr. Hunt: I don't think agile has evolved a whole lot, which proves everyone missed the point. Agile is supposed to be ever-changing and ever-adapting to the context and project at hand—and it hasn't been.
Instead, we've seen wide-scale adoption of some better software development practices, but we haven't seen any significant adoption of true agile behavior. Remember, you can't do agile; you have to be agile. That distinction has been lost over the last decade.
Mr. Jeffries: The fundamental ideas we expressed in the agile manifesto have held up amazingly well, at least with the authors and, we believe, with everyone who understands what we were and are talking about.
Naturally, we have refined our understanding of exactly how to go about effectively putting in place those ideas. But so far, none of us feels the need to drop any of those values and principles, nor plug in any new ones.
What's been most surprising regarding agile and its effect on project management?
Mr. Highsmith: I've been surprised that it has taken the project management community so long to seriously engage with the agile community. That said, I think the project management community can have a significant impact on the wider use of agile methods in organizations.
Mr. Jeffries: Frankly, I have been most surprised at how tenacious the old ideas have been. Adoption of the full spectrum of what we were talking about remains rare. There are too many entrenched stakeholders who cannot see how their personal situations will be enhanced by going in the agile direction.
Mr. van Bennekum: It has been surprising to me that the same issues keep coming back. During the ‘90s, the agile project delivery framework, dynamic systems development method (DSDM), was growing in Europe, and we ran into all kinds of problems, such as how to prioritize, test and manage a steering committee or management team to adapt to an agile decision-making process.
From the DSDM perspective, those problems were solved. But at the moment, they are coming back again on most of the agile projects and agile implementations I see.
What is agile's place outside of software development?
Mr. Jeffries: The key ideas apply everywhere. These include, but are not limited to:
■ Putting people with needs in direct contact with people who can fulfill those needs
■ Populating projects with all the needed people and capabilities to get the job done
■ Building work incrementally and checking results as you go
■ Preparing for and influencing the future but not predicting it
■ Making tasks concrete and quickly finishing them
■ Giving people work to do and the knowledge to do it, not pushing them around like pawns on a chessboard
■ Focusing on providing value frequently and rapidly, not directly on cost
Agile ideas are based on how people and organizations work best. There are specialized details we need to know regarding software, just as there are in any other domain. The principles, however, are broadly applicable.
Mr. Highsmith: In any project that faces uncertainty, complexity, volatility and risk, there is a place for agile practices and principles.
AGILE AUTHORS
JIM HIGHSMITH is a Venice, Florida, USA-based executive consultant at ThoughtWorks, an agile consultancy.
ANDREW HUNT is the Raleigh, North Carolina, USA-based cofounder of Pragmatic Bookshelf and coauthor of The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master.
RON JEFFRIES is a trainer and coach at XProgramming.com, an extreme programming consultancy in Pinckney, Michigan, USA.
ARIE VAN BENNEKUM is a program and project manager at PMtD (People Make the Difference), a project management and IT consulting firm in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Learn more about how to connect with others interested in agile techniques, or how to earn the PMI-ACPSM credential, at PMI.org/agile.
Mr. van Bennekum: Agile is holistic and applicable everywhere in business or life. I use it as a concept wherever I am and for whatever I do, from defining online strategies to the total refurbishment of my house.
Mr. Hunt: The agile mindset is critical to successful business in the 21st century. At its heart, an agile approach has little to do with software; it's all about recognizing and applying feedback. The definition of “agile” that Venkat Subramanium and I proposed in Practices of an Agile Developer states, “Agile development uses feedback to make constant adjustments in a highly collaborative environment.”
Notice there's nothing in there about software. The Pragmatic Bookshelf publishing company, in fact, has been called an “agile publishing company” by our many fans. We seek to embody the principles of agility throughout our business practices.
Charles Darwin famously said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” We have become keenly aware of this through our work with software.
But rapid adaptation is the single most important idea of this century for any business, in any market.
Where would you like agile to go in the future?
Mr. Jeffries: I would like to see more people working toward a true understanding of agile—which only can come about by actually doing it and experiencing it. It is a way of working that leads to a way of thinking. Entering into it theoretically is tempting, but people's theoretical imaginings do not amount to real understanding.
Mr. Hunt: I'd like to see agile go where we thought it would go 10 years ago: with a flourishing ecosystem of new ideas, new development practices, new languages, new methodologies and new ways to satisfy the customer with working code that's easy to modify and evolve to suit the rapidly changing needs of modern business.
We've seen some modest individual successes in each of these areas but not exactly a flourishing.
Mr. van Bennekum: Agile will become more important because of its ability to respond to change. Product life cycles are much shorter and businesses are continuously changing, which requires agile. Agile especially will grow in portfolio management and business management because we cannot do without it. The most healthy organizations will be agile organizations.
How is the recent PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)SM credential helping the progress of agile?
Mr. van Bennekum: People use the word “agile” sometimes without any sense of what it really is. For people hiring consultants, certification will become a criterion. PM
