Successful Project Management – Part 8: The 6 Secrets to Success with Agile Project Management

Welcome back to the series on project management. Today’s topic is agile project management.

For a long time now we’ve been busy mainly with online meetings, online workshops, online collaboration tools & co.

But after a while we found we needed a break from Covid-19 and all the associated issues, don’t you agree?

Hence, back to our series.

We almost forgot about it ourselves 🙂 You can read all about it here:

Part 1: “As you sow, so you shall reap!”

Part 2: The Stakeholder Analysis

Part 3: Project Management as a Process

Part 4: The Kickoff Meeting

Part 5: The Work Breakdown Structure

Part 6: Here’s How to Plan Your Budget

Part 7: Tips for Project Billing and Continuous Monitoring

And so … today we continue with the exciting topic “Agile Project Management.”

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Agile PM – the latest thing?

“Latest thing” is relative. Already back in 1995 two trends emerged with methodologies focusing on “agility”. One of these was SCRUM (which is well known in the meantime, and positions itself mainly as “agile product development”.) And the second trend was, well, agile project management (formerly known as DSDM, Dynamic Systems Development Method). This one positioned itself more in the realm of integration into the corporate world, with agile committees and project managers.

Is agile the new flexible?

Defining agile project management isn’t that simple.

Basically, one can see it as a new way of thinking as opposed to planning-oriented (or even “planning fixated”) traditional project management.

Or in other words: agile means that projects and processes are managed and steered very dynamically and flexibly. This allows for changes to be implemented rapidly, especially when it comes to scope of performance.

Agile PM certainly does plan, too.

However, it merely sets the cornerstones so that the project doesn’t head off course, and plans the details in advance only for the next section. This way one can learn and give the people who actually work with them access to the details.

The agile project management manifesto

In a nutshell, this means that …

People and interactions are more important than processes and tools
Functioning products are more important than exhaustive documentation
Working together with customers is more important than contract negotiation, and
Reacting to change is more important than following a plan.

Although the values at the end of these bullet points are certainly considered important (that is to say processes, documentation, contract negotiations, etc.) the values at the beginning have greater significance. This is what the Agile Manifesto, established back in 2001 by its 17 founding fathers, states.

But how can one imagine this in practice? What exactly does it mean for my project?

The 6 Success Factors of Agile Project Management

This means specifically (among other things):

Relentless transparency of all facts.
Stop pointing the finger at individuals. Instead, work together on solution options.
Wherever possible, administration has no breeding ground anymore. Documention only to the extent that it is meaningful for operations and maintenance.
An end to written reports (even those for preventive justification). Stakeholders are summoned to the scene of the action. Show what the issue is. Illustrate the effects. Make it understandable. And avoid politics of any kind.
To create products that customers can actually use, it’s essential to involve them throughout the development phase.
Learning is paramount for success.

Have you already collected experience with agile project management? What do you think of it? Post a comment and let us know! !

The basis for this blog article was delivered by our trainer colleague and agile PM expert Dieter Strasser, managing director of Viable Projects GmbH, and one of THE leading experts in Austria in this field. There’s a lot to be discovered on the Viable Projects GmbH YouTube-Channel (mostly in german, though). Thank you, dear Dieter, for your contribution and inspiration!

And what naturally fits in excellently with this is the Service Design Thinking Approach, which BusinessMind often uses for innovation processes. To see how it’s actually applied, take a look e.g. at the AIT innovation workshop, described in these two blog articles: Part 1 and Part 2.

All the best,

Your BusinessMind Team