Agile project management is an iterative and incremental management approach, focused on meeting requirements throughout the project life cycle. In essence, a project managed under the Agile approach complies with the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto, and should promote behaviors such as: trust, flexibility, empowerment and collaboration.
The defining characteristic of an Agile project is that it produces and delivers “work” based on short periods of time, known as iterations or sprints . These last approximately one to four weeks, and are repeated iteratively. The purpose of this way of working is to favor the adaptation of the work to the changing requirements of the client, based on the feedback received at the end of each iteration.
To better understand the implications of the Agile approach to project management, it is common to contrast them with the traditional approach. While the former is known as the Agile or adaptive approach, the traditional approach is also known as the predictive or cascade approach. The fundamental difference between Agile or Adaptive systems and Traditional or Predictive approaches is in the way the project life cycle is managed.
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How Project Management With Agile Methodologies Arises
Agile project management projects appear in a context of change in the markets. Markets change because customers’ needs change faster and faster and, therefore, they ask companies to adapt to their needs. Given this, organizations begin to use different project acceleration practices , such as Lean Startup .Tools or frameworks are also devised to manage agile projects, such as Scrum .
The objective of agile project management methodologies is to deliver a minimum model to the market, so that it can be validated. Afterwards, the product or service continues to improve, according to the needs of the clients. What the customer does is try the product, see what they like, the errors they find, what they don’t like, and give feedback to the company that created that product or service.
Therefore, in agile growth environments, it is generally necessary to have teams and an organization that works in a way that is more or less adapted to the needs of the client. These methodologies can also be applied in remote work lathes.
How The Scrum Method Of Project Management Works
On the other hand, the Scrum methodology seeks to increase the speed and flexibility of product or service development. Within this agile Project Management methodology, work requirements, design and integration are included.
The key element of Scrum are the so-called sprints . These are meetings that are held to see how the different elements or roles of the project work with each other. The methodology also implies having a product owner. This figure takes a task, divides it into subtasks, and assigns them to each of the project team members.
On the other hand, there is the Scrum Master, which is the figure to whom what is being done is explained. In this way, if problems arise within the meetings, the Scrum Master will be in charge of giving the precise instructions to solve them.
