Traditional project management methods have worked well for a long time. It’s natural for companies, particularly larger companies, to view anything that differs from that approach with something akin to trepidation. They see change as risk. Risk is to be avoided. For project managers, a company-wide adherence to traditional project management methods can be a bad thing, though. There are ways that you can implement Agile concepts into your traditional management situation, and you might just find that slowly adding these elements helps upper management get used to the idea of moving away from tradition.
In Meetings
Regular meetings should be a part of your project. However, traditional PM methodologies don’t really reinforce the need for these. Agile, on the other hand, does. You can add this element to your project and provide very visible results for upper management and stakeholders. For instance, Agile promotes a concept called a stand-up meeting during which team members are allowed to voice their concerns. This provides an open forum for communication, helps give you a heads up for any potential issues coming down the road and can allow you to avoid disaster.
Review Meetings
In traditional project management, the end of the project is when reviews are conducted to determine what lessons might have been learned and what steps might be taken in the future to avoid any problems encountered. However, this is a reactive stance. In order for your project to be successful, you really need a proactive stance. Agile offers that with review meetings. Review meetings are held throughout the project and are designed to review what occurred during tasks, steps and milestones immediately preceding the meeting (but before the end of the project). This allows you to gather data, make choices and decisions based on almost real-time information that can then be implemented within the current project.
Test Deliverables during Development
Agile offers the ability to do “sample testing” – a small test of deliverables during the development phase of the project. This ensures that deliverables are error free before the end of the task, unlike with traditional project management, where errors might not show up for a very long time, and then require revisions, reworking and more costs.
Stakeholder Feedback
Stakeholders are very important to any project, but they can be overlooked until the project’s end. However, Agile offers the concept of stakeholder feedback and demonstrations. In this type of situation, you or your team would demonstrate products (whatever the project is supposed to develop) for the stakeholders while the project is still ongoing and before the end of the production stage. This allows stakeholders to provide immediate feedback and for any changes to be made right away.
Integrating Agile concepts within your traditional project management methodology might not sound like the easiest thing to do, but it can be done, as highlighted above. In addition to helping you improve project success, it can also encourage higher ups to adopt Agile completely where possible.
