Review of Agile Project Management Methodologies
Over the years the agile project management methodology process has helped managers immensely with their business projects. The agile management process is a cycle of continuous improvement; it allows you to improve the product through each iteration development cycle.
The reason for that is because it gives you the freedom to quickly test the product to see how your customers and stake holders would react to it so that through the next development cycle you can use the feedback data to improve the product until it’s at an acceptable state.
This process allows you to cut time and cost because instead of doing it sequentially until the product is finished in a step by step manner. You can test the product as soon as you add a new feature to it to see if it fits your market right.
They are lots benefits why the agile project management method can be a good fit for your organization. It embraces flexibility within your project development process, in the traditional way of doing things you usually have a set agenda of things you must do to get the job done, all laid out to your team and they must follow that process until the project is finished and this can be a bit detrimental especially if you are working in an industry that’s changing; by the time your product is released the market is already changed and your product is outdated.
Agile allows you to make changes anytime within a project development process; this will allow you to make changes to the product to make it more adaptable to the market if necessary. It’s also a faster process because when you are finished with the product or a product feature you can quickly test it with customers and get feedback in order to make it much better when the next version is released.
You have 6 stages in the agile management methodology, these consists of a project plan, launch date, sprint plan, daily scrum review, sprint review and general review. You can see more detail about them below.
Project plan
In this part of the methodology you must get together with your team and plan out the project. Talk about the vision of where you want to take the product and create a step by step plan of how you want to get it done; this plan can always be modified throughout the development process.
Launch date
In this part of the process you are going to plan the release date of the product or feature that you are planning to release. You and your team must work hard to ensure that you hit your milestones.
Sprint plan
A sprint is a short cycle of development, it’s basically an iteration period where you and your team set a release date for a certain feature or product improvement and you work towards it. This is the backbone of the agile project management methodology; it’s also flexible because it allows your customers to test the product as soon as the iteration period is finished. The sprint plan is a meeting at the beginning of each iteration period where the team commits to a sprint goal.
Daily scrum review
This a short 20-30 min meeting held each day in a sprint, where you gather the different team members for them state what they have completed during the day before and what they would complete on the current day and what challenges they are facing.
Sprint review
This is a meeting held at the end of each sprint or iteration development cycle. This is where the team that’s working on the product demonstrates the product’s functionality and what they have completed while working in the sprint development cycle.
General review
This is a meeting where you all get together and take a bird eye’s view of what took place during the entire process. This happens at the end of each sprint cycle, this where everyone discusses what executed well and what did not and how you are going to approach the next development cycle to make it more efficient.
Agile project management is bringing in a new form of productivity into the workplace and managers are really capitalizing on this awesome tool and are reaping amazing results from it.
If you are serious about implementing the agile project management methodology in your company, you can take your first step by implementing the process above and over a period of time you will see how useful this tool can be.