6 Strengths Agile Brings to Projects

To make Project Management more “Agile” is a popular need for many organizations. You don’t need to go “completely Agile” throwing your Project Management knowledge away.

Since the turn of the century there has been a dramatic rise in projects using ‘agile’ techniques and approaches. This started in the IT sector but is now seen throughout the project management arena. Many organizations are employing agile disciplines at programme level, as well as at ‘the coal face’, as the popularity of this approach continues to grow.
Each organization has to find its own way to become “more Agile”. There is a paper from the Stationery Office (2013) that describes a very typical situation for many organizations:

“PRINCE2 is often perceived as being bureaucratic, prescriptive and fundamentally linear (or waterfall) in its composition and execution. However, this is not strictly true; these problems are the result of how PRINCE2 has been implemented in an organization. Integrating DSDM into a PRINCE2 environment addresses these issues directly.
There are 6 specific strengths that an Agile approach can bring to a PRINCE2 environment:

1. 1. Customer Focus: Agile methodologies are referred as “customer centric”
   2. Supports Iterative and Incremental product development: Agile is focused on early ROI
   3. Provides better structure at Delivery Level: while PRINCE2 only provides the Team Manager role, the Agile organizational structure goes much lower down
   4. Promotes an Agile ethos: working in an agile way is all about behaviours and culture
   5. Promotes rich communication: Facilitated workshops are typically used in Agile projects in order to produce high-quality outputs in a short space of time
   6. Ease of integration: It is important to realize that creating an agile capability from within PRINCE2 does not require a restructuring of the method. To create a robust, fully scalable agile capability, use the existing structures of PRINCE2 and integrate a methodology like AgilePM into and below it.

Source: First published in “Integrating DSDM into an Existing PRINCE2 Environment” and reproduced with kind permission of “APMG International”.