Excerpt: Agile Project Management

The project manager role will morph as it takes on features of adaptive management.

Environmental and political stresses will create a groundswell of demand for processes like agile that can help us respond to global problems nimbly.

Once out of the software development box, agile methods will be found to resonate in many, if not all, areas of the business—most importantly, in helping corporate leaders to do strategic planning under conditions of uncertainty.

Implications of Standards and Compliance

The very notion of industry and professional standards—particularly where compliance with those standards is backed up by formal regulation, as with the project manager qualification in Australia, or in the practice of medicine worldwide—presents a formidable hurdle to the adoption of agile methods in management. Wherever governments or professional organizations have striven to guarantee consumer and worker safety and/or best-practice governance of organizations, those regulations and standards act to eliminate exactly the sort of creative, flexible behaviors that agile methods seek to capitalize upon. Is it, in fact, even possible to use agile methods within best-practice frameworks of this type? At the present stage of development, this question remains unanswered, yet there are some indications that, where there is a necessity for agile project management, there is a way to adapt the practices and still remain in sync with accepted standards.

For example, at a recent meeting of the National Nuclear Security Agency, presenters reporting on the results of a massive construction project—precisely the sort of high-security, low-risk-tolerance project that has previously been a beneficiary of linear project management practices—noted in their lessons learned that "when you include equipment that isn't well understood in the scope, it creates problems," and that a more agile approach to planning would have alleviated the 17-month schedule overrun the plant experienced. Their observation is certainly applicable to any industry or government project that uses cutting-edge technology. When following accepted practice becomes a financial burden, can the adaptation of more realistic agile methods be far behind?

Likewise in the pharmaceuticals industry, the processes and standards for drug development and manufacture are heavy with bureaucratic redundancies designed to ensure patient safety—yet there is pressure on the industry to bring life-saving medications to market more quickly. A child dying of AIDS doesn't have the five to seven years that it can take to bring a new drug over the hurdles. As the global village grows smaller, the ability to treat new diseases—or diseases spreading from the tropics as a result of climate change and global travel—will at some point make agility more desirable both from a bottom-line standpoint and from the doctors' and patients' standpoint.

One area that some agile gurus are already addressing is the way that agility can actually support, rather than conflict with, such drivers of corporate transparency and risk management as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. [Agile expert] Ross Pettit points out that factors outside the control of a company's internal operations often impair execution of even the best-laid plans. The ability to forecast and respond to change in a timely fashion will go a long way to meeting revenue targets and goals, reducing risk. Instead of forecasts based on "the pursuit of a mythical number given at the beginning of a quarter," agile practices such as decomposing deliverables into smaller components, each with an associated revenue amount, gives the company a granular unit of work with economic properties.