Excerpt: Agile Project Management

The following is an excerpt from Karen R.J. White's Agile Project Management: A Mandate for the 21st Century (Center for Business Practices, 2009). Chapter 5: Our Agile Future

Traditional management methods, including project management, came of age over the course of the 20th century, evolving hand in hand with certain bureaucratic assumptions—assumptions about power, control, centralization, and linear problem solving—most of which do not work very well anymore. To predict how agile methods may be used in organizations in the next few decades from our vantage point in 2008 is perilous: it's unlikely that we can actually foresee how business will alter. (Imagine yourself back in 1980 for a moment: could you have predicted Facebook as a business tool?) Yet certain trends are clear:

Agile methods will somewhat clash with currently existing standards in project management, as well as standards in many application areas of project management.