Searching for Agility

Posted by Rich Crowley in Agile, Project Management

I’ve been managing projects for many years now. Most of my clients have some project management methodology in place that I am to follow while working on their behalf and more often than not, the PMBOK is the underlying framework for these methodologies.

While overall my clients have been happy with the results I’ve produced, when I look back at the projects that went well, I get the feeling that the methodology was in some cases as much of a hindrance as a benefit. I’ve done some thinking to try to understand why and it seems to me the PMBOK is geared best to a waterfall approach in IT projects. This may not true, and may simply be how I’ve been applying it.

I think the reason the methodology sometimes gets in the way is that most PMBOK-based methodologies have built-in checkpoints (sometimes called kill-point, phases, stage-gates or gates) and the expectation is that all project deliverables can be assessed on the basis for a given checkpoint. For example, in a systems development project for a new commission systems, there may be data entry and edit capabilities, batch processing capabilities, interfaces to external systems both in and outbound and a reporting component.

Early on in a project, the progress on these components can be at vastly different stages but if the project as a whole has to pass through a particular checkpoint considering all of these as part of the whole, there is a fair degree more ambiguity about some pieces than others for any given checkpoint. This limits the usefulness of the checkpoint information and hence hinders managements ability to use the information well.

There is much excitement and a fair amount of noise occurring today around agile approaches to systems development and the management of such efforts. I’m officially diving into the agile world to see how well some of the alternate PM approaches may alleviate some of these problems I’ve encountered. I’m particularly interested in how to build iterations of activities into project plans. I suspect I’ll want / need to take a hybrid approach for some clients where I build iterations into existing PMBOK-based approaches