Agile Phase questions

[StephenPMO]

Hi.  Could not find documentation on Agile Phases to answer these questions.  Hope you can help?

1. What is the purpose of an Agile Phase in a Hybrid project?
2. Can there be more than one Agile Phase?
3. Is an Agile Phase basically just a Parent task in the plan?
4. I've noticed if I unindent the Agile phase in the project plan it is no longer in the list of Agile phases.  Is this normal or is something broken?

Thank you in advance.

[Pall Sigurdsson]

1. The agile phase is for enabling the project deliver via user stories. Stories differ from project tasks in various ways, especially in that they follow different state flow. Agile phases are especially useful when the tasks required to build a key deliverable or set of deliverables cannot be determined beforehand, when this is done during project execution. Also, if your project needs support from a team which is already managing their delivery via agile development then an agile phase can be used to generate stories that this team can then include in their development sprints, utilizing the integration between PPM and agile development 2.0.

2. When ServiceNow initially introduced agile phases in projects it was only possible to have one agile phase per project but that has long since been enhanced and now in all the latest family versions you can have multiple agile phases per project.

3. Yes, an agile phase is just a project task. Only project tasks in the first level in the hierarchy (those whose parent is the project record itself) can be set as an agile phase.

4. As the agile phase can only be in the lowest layer of project task, lowering it further would put it to the same level as the project itself, which would mean it would lose its parent. But maybe I misunderstood you. Can you provide steps to reproduce this?

[Alpa82]

It would be nice if this could be included in the product documentation