Is Agile Project Management Right For You?
When preparing to do work on a project of any size, the key foundation that you’ll need is a solid idea. Got that? Great! But setting that plan in motion is a great deal more difficult.
It all begins with your team and how you put them into your chess game of work productivity. Your office is the board and each member has moves, skills and capabilities that help you get the all important checkmate. In this case your goal is a project completed to the best of your ability.
But, traditional project management tells you to think about the pieces and their individual labels. For example, people may be sorted into the programming pawns, the art design knights and so on and so forth. The smartest of organisers will recognise that each piece can help the team as a whole. Indeed, the best strategy is agile project management.
What Is Agile Project Management?
By definition, agile project management is a software development and management system “in which requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams”. Its benefits are great and it is has been adopted by software development teams across the board, but why is that?
Over everything, agile project management encourages team members to work together to fix problems rather than go it alone.
If someone doesn’t know how to go about the solution they no longer have to toil away until they have a fix. Instead, they can work with other team members to find a work around and shave time off of the project.
What Are The Benefits of Agile?
With the agile way of thinking collaboration with the product owner is encouraged. When you hire a company like EL Passion, you shouldn’t think we have free reign. Rather, it’s us helping make your dreams become reality. As a paying client you should be able to have an input and a say on what’s happening because once it’s delivered back to you it has to be the best realisation of your dream as possible.
Not only does that mean that you’re not stifled by a previously negotiated contract, it allows the team to fine tune their goals to exactly what you asked for.
In addition, as part of the agile manifesto the team can respond to large changes quickly. Because the they are no longer held down by the cubicle hogging, defined roles way of doing things, agile teams can self-organise and nip problems in the bud as soon as they arise. Responding to change makes more sense than following a rigid plan because no one can foresee everything that could possibly go wrong and hinder the project.
Furthermore, agile project management puts individuals and the interactions between them over all else. Although certain processes and tools may be long followed and supported, that doesn’t always mean that they aren’t flawed. Following them completely makes teams more susceptible to those issues, but if you craft the tasks around the people carrying them out (the way that agile project management does) things can flow more freely and with less bumps in the road too.
Should You Choose Agile Project Management?
It’s not just software developers that are using agile either with companies like Google and Facebook using it across their teams too. So when it comes to getting the job done well and on time, the only answer to that question posed in the headline is a big, resounding ‘yes’.
