What is agile project management
Over the years we have seen different types of business methodologies being embraced by managers and executives in their organization to make it more efficient and productive.
We have seen methodologies such as the waterfall method which is still effective today but it has a couple of drawbacks to it. For example, you don’t start the design process until all the research is finished and you don’t start the development process until the design is finished; it’s very sequential.
This can be a bit time consuming because if you are working in a step by step process on a certain project and when you have finished it and it somehow never came out the way you would like it to which is usually what happens; you got to start all over again which is not that productive.
Agile project management is a methodology that solves that issue perfectly because instead of a step by step sequence; you now have designers, developers and different business teams working together simultaneously and continuously iterating as they go along to get the product right, which is a much cheaper and productive process.
Agile project management breaks down projects into smaller and more manageable pieces called iterations or a sprint. This allows the project to be more easily managed and also the end product that is being developed just keeps getting better as each iteration cycle ends. It was founded in software development, which did make the developing process for software engineer’s way faster, easier and cheaper. It was then crossed over from the computer science community into the business community where managers came to rely on it immensely when developing a product.
Agile project management also allows you to work closely with the customers in your market; so during each product iteration cycle you can do user testing. This will allow you to get feedback from your users and you can use the data you collect from them to improve the product.
In project management, developing and marketing a product can be very unpredictable, over the course of a project development cycle there are going to be a lot of changes especially if the product’s going to take over a year to create; so many things can happen in that development period such as a new innovation may disrupt your market causing you to rethink everything in order to make your product adaptable to consumers.
Agile helps to eliminate that risk, by breaking down the project with your team, it makes it easy to manage and delegate different processes throughout the different teams who are working on the project.
It allows you to add and drop features while developing the product if necessary which is where waterfall fell short. It also makes it easier for you to make changes in your project development process if it’s required at any time and that is what makes it so special.
There have been times where managers laid out a set plan to their team and they have to stick to it until the project is finished and that can lead to a disastrous outcome. Agile project management changes all that because it allows you to constantly tweak your different development processes as you go along and your team will seamlessly adapt to it.
So as you can see by reading what agile project management is above, it is really a useful tool business managers can embrace in their project development processes to cut cost and bring more productivity within their teams.