Agile project management is an iterative approach to managing projects, continuously incorporating feedback throughout project lifecycles.
Agile project management is an approach based on the Agile methodology of software development, where cross-functional teams use continual collaboration, planning, learning, and improvement to deliver software more quickly and respond more flexibly to change. The aim of the Agile approach is to deliver benefits throughout the entire software-development process, rather than releasing all the benefits only at the completion of the project. Agile management exists to help coordinate teams, establish effective processes, set deadlines, and ensure that Agile software projects are successful.
Perhaps most importantly, Agile provides organizations with the opportunity to apply feedback and ‘course correct,’ changing the direction or focus of a project at any stage (unlike the waterfall approach, which is a rigid framework that limits objective planning to the earliest stages of the project). Although Agile and Agile management were originally created to facilitate better software development, the core values of Agile are inclusive enough to encompass many kinds of projects. These core values are taken from the original Agile manifesto:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
- Working software over comprehensive documentation.
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
- Responding to change over following a plan.
In other words, Agile needs to be free to rely on intelligent team members to create working solutions, rather than dogmatically following established processes. It brings customers into the development process, soliciting feedback and workshopping solutions. It focuses on creating actual deliverables, instead of spending large amounts of time creating detailed documentation. And through it all, Agile must be able to improvise and adapt.
Agile project management emerged as a response to the traditional waterfall approach that dominated the early years of software development. The origins of Agile can be traced back to the late 1990s and early 2000s when a group of software developers came together to discuss and document their alternative approaches to project management. This led to the creation of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, which outlined a set of guiding principles for Agile software development.
The Agile Manifesto emphasized flexibility, collaboration, and iterative development. It advocated for adaptive planning, continuous improvement, and customer involvement throughout the project. This marked a significant departure from the rigid and linear nature of the waterfall model, where requirements were fixed upfront, and changes were often difficult to accommodate during subsequent stages.
Since its inception, Agile project management has gained widespread popularity and acceptance in the software development industry.
Agile project management is built on a foundation of five essential pillars. Each pillar describes an attribute associated with 'agility,' and each plays a crucial role in ensuring the success of Agile projects by enabling development teams to deliver high-quality software efficiently, flexibly, and at scale.
Transparency is at the core of Agile project management. This pillar emphasizes open communication and visibility of project information among team members and stakeholders. By promoting information sharing on project goals, progress, challenges, decisions, and more, transparency promotes trust, collaboration, and accountability throughout the department. This enables teams to make informed decisions and adapt quickly to changes while fostering a culture of openness and shared responsibility.
Agile project management places a strong emphasis on understanding and fulfilling customer needs. By actively involving customers throughout the development process, teams can gather feedback, validate assumptions, and prioritize work based on customer value. This customer-centric approach ensures that the final product meets the requirements and expectations of the end-users, resulting in higher satisfaction and business value.
Agility is synonymous with adaptability. Agile project management embraces change and acknowledges that requirements and priorities can evolve over time. Teams continuously assess and adjust their plans, processes, and solutions to accommodate new insights and emerging requirements. This flexibility allows teams to respond to market dynamics, technology advancements, and changing business needs effectively, ensuring that the delivered software remains relevant and valuable.
Agile project management recognizes the importance of strong and supportive leadership. Leaders in Agile environments empower teams, provide clear direction, and remove impediments to enable their success. They foster a collaborative and autonomous work environment, promote self-organizing teams, and serve as coaches and mentors to guide and support team members. Effective leadership in Agile project management helps promote a sense of project ownership within the teams and is essential for creating an environment where developers can thrive and deliver their best work.
Agile teams are committed to learning, experimenting, and refining their processes to enhance both productivity and quality. The attribute described in this pillar highlights the need to regularly reflect on development projects, identify areas for improvement, and implement changes incrementally. This iterative approach to improvement ensures that teams are constantly evolving and adapting to deliver better outcomes with each iteration.
Agile project management is a tried-and-true management philosophy that has proven itself in the software development space and is beginning to see application in other industries and projects. This is because Agile project management and the Agile methodology it supports bring with them several significant business advantages. These include the following benefits:
Agile project management places a strong emphasis on customer collaboration and involvement throughout the development process. By engaging customers as active stakeholders, teams can gain a deep understanding of their needs and expectations. This close collaboration enables teams to deliver software solutions that align closely with customer requirements, resulting in increased customer satisfaction. The iterative nature of Agile allows for frequent feedback loops, enabling teams to incorporate changes and address any issues early on while ensuring that the end product meets (or exceeds) customer expectations.
Agile project management embraces change as an inherent part of the development process. Agile teams can respond quickly to evolving market conditions, changing customer needs, and emerging opportunities without losing progress on their projects. The iterative development cycles of Agile allow for continuous feedback and adaptation, making it easier to incorporate new requirements or apply modifications to existing ones. This flexibility enables teams to deliver high-quality software that remains relevant and valuable even in rapidly changing environments.
Agile project management emphasizes iterative and incremental development, focusing on delivering working software in small batches. This approach allows teams to prioritize and deliver features with the highest business value first. By breaking down the project into smaller, manageable chunks, Agile teams can allocate resources based on changing priorities and adjust the scope as needed. This efficient use of resources minimizes waste, enhances productivity, and helps teams deliver software on time and within budget.
In Agile, team members are typically dedicated to a single project rather than being spread across multiple projects or teams simultaneously. This focused dedication allows team members to immerse themselves fully in the project's goals and requirements. They can contribute their skills and expertise more effectively, avoid context switching, and develop a deep understanding of the project itself. This ultimately leads to better project outcomes.
Agile teams work in cross-functional units where individuals from different disciplines come together to collaborate on a common goal. By encouraging close collaboration, Agile project management facilitates quicker decision-making and promotes an enhanced sense of ownership and accountability. As a result, projects benefit from better problem-solving and increased innovation, along with a stronger sense of camaraderie and trust within the team.
The iterative nature of Agile project development naturally cuts down on unnecessary, inefficient work. What is left is a resource-friendly set of highly visible processes almost completely devoid of waste.
Because Agile project management allows for more streamlined processes, work can be completed more quickly and efficiently. This drastically reduces project spend. At the same time, issues and defects can be discovered and resolved more quickly, eliminating a number of costs associated with repair and remediation.
The benefit that gives Agile its name, adaptability is a core focus of Agile management. The iterative approach allows teams to easily reassess projects mid-development, pivoting where and whenever necessary to better address emergent issues and shifting priorities.
Agile management is built on project visibility, enhanced through daily check-ins where teams can discuss progress and troubleshoot how to address roadblocks. With clear project visibility, teams are much less likely to encounter an unexpected issue and will have a head start addressing any issues they do encounter. This means less risk associated with any Agile projects.
Although Agile project management is designed to help guide Agile teams, the truth is that most Agile teams are extremely autonomous. They enjoy the freedom to innovate, ideate solutions, and come up with new ideas. At the same time, smaller teams help ensure that everyone involved is playing an integral part in achieving goals. Together, these and other factors help individual team members feel valued and trusted, improving employee engagement.
Perhaps the most important focus of Agile management is the satisfaction of the end user. In Agile development, the customer becomes a member of the team, providing ongoing feedback and collaborating with developers to workshop solutions and ensure higher-quality deliverables. By working with customers, teams provide their end users with solutions that actually solve customer problems. Additionally, customers know that their input is valued, and that the organization is committed to providing them with the best possible service.
Transitioning to Agile project management can yield remarkable benefits, but it's not without its share of challenges. Recognizing and addressing these hurdles is essential for successful Agile implementation. Here are three common challenges teams often encounter in Agile project management, along with suggestions on how to overcome them:
- Challenge: Shifting from traditional methodologies to Agile can require a mindset change, which may be met with resistance from team members accustomed to established processes.
- Solution: Foster a culture of open communication and transparency. Educate the team about Agile principles and the reasons behind the transition. Involve team members in the decision-making process to ensure their concerns are heard. Celebrate small wins along the way to boost morale and reinforce the positive aspects of Agile.
- Challenge: Agile teams are often organized in ways that may be unfamiliar to those accustomed to more traditional hierarchical structures. At the same time, the individual responsibilities of Agile team members may feel nebulous without clear direction from those with Agile experience.
- Solution: Provide clear guidance on the roles and responsibilities within the Agile team, as well as the structure of the team itself. Ensure team members understand how their contributions align with project goals. Encourage collaboration and cross-functional skills development to ensure everyone is capable of stepping into different roles when needed. Facilitate regular retrospectives where the team can discuss challenges and successes, enabling continuous learning and improvement.
- Challenge: Unlike traditional waterfall approaches where projects start with well-defined requirements from start to finish, Agile projects often begin with more fluid, evolving ideas. This need for fluidity can make some team members feel anxious.
- Solution: Foster adaptive planning. Start with a high-level understanding of the project's goals and objectives. Encourage collaboration between the development team and stakeholders to define requirements iteratively as the project progresses. Employ techniques like user stories, story mapping, and backlog refinement sessions to capture evolving requirements effectively.
Although Agile and Agile management were originally created to facilitate better software development, the core values of Agile are inclusive enough to encompass many kinds of projects. These core values are taken from the original Agile manifesto:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
- Working software over comprehensive documentation.
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
- Responding to change over following a plan.
In other words, Agile needs to be free to rely on intelligent team members to create working solutions, rather than dogmatically following established processes. It brings customers into the development process, soliciting feedback and workshopping solutions. It focuses on creating actual deliverables, instead of spending copious amounts of time creating detailed documentation. And through it all, Agile must be able to improvise and adapt.
The Agile process can be broken down into six key steps. While these steps can help visualize how Agile operates in project management, it's worth recognizing that this is an iterative process; the design, development, and release stages may be revisited multiple times in successive iteration, allowing teams more flexibility in refining the product rather than having to follow a linear path. Not every aspect of the project must be defined upfront; teams can pivot as they gather new information or encounter unforeseen issues.
- Requirements
Teams ideate the project and determine what their priorities should be based on company goals and customer needs.
- Plan
Project managers assemble teams, secure funding, determine initial project requirements (which will likely evolve as the project continues), create backlogs of items, and potentially move those items into sprints. - Design
Teams begin developing the product. Incorporating ongoing feedback and considering established requirements, these teams use multiple iterations and reliable communication to complete the project. - Development
During the development stage, QA testing, training, and documentation development are put into production. - Release
Upon release, development teams continue to refine and support the product through on-going iterations. - Monitoring
Teams deliver the product to the customer. Teams continue to consider customer notifications and migrations, along with any end-of-life tasks.
As previously stated, Agile management was designed based on Agile software development practices. That said, its approach may be easily employed in other departments (such as marketing or products), and organizations in many different industries are adapting Agile management to improve their processes.
In fact, any business that needs the flexibility to operate in an uncertain environment may benefit from Agile management. This includes automotive, education, military, and more. Agile project management contributes to organizational agility, empowering businesses to adapt quickly and with minimal disruption to changing operating environments.
Agile project management offers various methodologies that teams can choose from to effectively implement Agile principles and practices in software development. These methodologies provide structured frameworks for managing software development projects in an iterative and collaborative manner. And while there are many different variations of Agile project management solutions, the most widely used solutions are Scrum, Kanban, and Scrumban.
Scrum is a framework for agile management. It follows essentially the same core values listed above and allows for many of the same benefits. However, it uses fixed-length iterations of work (called sprints) to increase collaboration, speed up development processes, and improve team focus.
How does Scrum work?
Backlogs are a major feature of Scrum, detailing the complete body of work that needs to be done. The product backlog is a list of features arranged by highest priority and the sprint backlog which identifies the tasks that will need to be completed during the Scrum sprint.
Scrum relies on three levels of accountability:
- The product owner
The product owner defines the overall project as well as the features it will include. They ensure that stakeholder feedback is being addressed, the product backlog is maintained, and that all associated team members understand project priorities. The product owner is also the voice of the customer, representing their needs and wants. - The development team
Usually consisting of three to nine people, the Scrum development team is self-organizing, and determines how best to accomplish the work. These teams are cross functional, and accountability belongs to the team as a whole, rather than to individual team members. - The Scrum master
The Scrum master helps keep the Scrum team on track, facilitates communication and improvement, and ensures that Agile principles are being adhered to.
What are the ceremonies of Scrum?
Within Scrum sprints, there are four kinds of meetings (called ceremonies). These ceremonies are held at key points in the development cycle and help ensure that everyone involved is working collaboratively and on the same page.
The four ceremonies of Scrum include the following:
- Sprint planning
Original planning meeting to determine sprint objectives. - Sprint demo
Sharing meeting to demonstrate what was completed during the sprint. - Daily standup
A short meeting allowing team members to sync and update one another on project and task status. - Retrospective
A review of the project, including an evaluation of what did and did not go well.
How do you use a Scrum board?
To visualize projects, processes, tasks, and responsibilities, Scrum incorporates a Scrum board. The Scrum board allows teams to easily move items from the product backlog into the sprint backlog, while incorporating multiple steps into the workflow, such as “to do,” “in progress,” and “done.”
Kanban is another popular Agile framework. Where Scrum is built on short, structured sprints, Kanban takes a more-fluid approach. Kanban matches the work to the team’s capacity, focusing on getting work done as fast as possible while effectively reacting to changes immediately as they arise.
How does Kanban work?
Kanban eschews backlogs and instead uses various columns to designate what work needs to be done. As teams complete tasks or projects, they can move directly onto something new without having to establish a new sprint. To ensure that teams are not operating beyond capacity, Kanban uses predefined limits (called work-in-progress limits, or WIP limits) to how much can be added to any column, other than the To-do column.
What are the components of Kanban?
The Kanban framework includes four components. These are as follows:
- Stories
Kanban stories are work projects, tasks, or issues that need to be completed or resolved. - Columns
Columns or lanes on a Kanban board distinguish which projects, users, workstreams, etc. are associated with which tasks. - WIP limits
WIP limits take team capacity into account to determine the maximum amount of work that can be added to each column or lane at a time. - Continuous releases
Working on various stories and without exceeding the WIP limit, teams can and should continually release products as they go.
How do you use a Kanban board?
Much like the Scrum board, the Kanban board offers project and task visualization for effectively establishing timelines and planning resources. The board is structured into the aforementioned columns. New stories are placed in the to-do column until WIP limits allow teams to begin work on the task. Teams move stories through designated columns, progressing through various statuses until they reach completion. Kanban boards not only visually represent what needs to be done, but also what tasks are of higher priority.
Scrumban combines elements of Scrum and Kanban. It offers a flexible approach that allows teams to leverage the strengths of both methodologies.
How does Scrumban work?
Scrumban adopts the Scrum framework while incorporating Kanban's visual management and flow optimization principles. This hybrid methodology is often used by teams transitioning from Scrum to Kanban or looking for a more tailored approach. Scrumban allows teams to balance the structure of Scrum with the flexibility of Kanban, providing opportunities for continuous improvement and increased efficiency.
Agile project management and the traditional waterfall approach represent two distinct methods for managing software development projects. While waterfall has been widely used in the past, Agile project management has gained prominence due to its ability to allow for a more fluid approach to meeting changing project needs while supporting Agile teams and projects throughout the development cycle. Still, each solution carries with is certain advantages:
The waterfall model follows a linear and sequential approach, where each phase of the project—such as requirements gathering, design, development, testing, and deployment—is completed in a predetermined order. The focus is on delivering a final product at the end of the project lifecycle.
Pros:
- Waterfall provides a structured framework with distinct phases, making it easier to plan and allocate resources accordingly.
- The linear nature of the waterfall model allows for better predictability in terms of timelines, milestones, and budget estimation.
- Waterfall emphasizes extensive documentation, which can be valuable for regulatory compliance or projects with strict documentation requirements.
- Scope is kept to a defined set of guidelines, with changes accounted for through project change requests and then rescoped into the project.
Cons:
- Once a phase is completed, it is challenging to make changes without disrupting the entire project plan, making it less adaptable to changing requirements.
- Stakeholders and customers often see the final product only at the end, limiting opportunities for early feedback and adjustments.
- The waterfall approach carries a higher risk of late-stage project failures, as any errors or issues discovered later in the project can be costly to address.
In place of linear sequences and predictability, Agile project management takes an iterative and incremental approach that focuses on adaptive planning, collaboration, and continuous improvement. This method allows for flexibility, increased customer involvement, and the delivery of value throughout every phase of the project lifecycle.
Pros:
- Agile embraces change and allows for flexibility in responding to evolving requirements, market dynamics, and customer feedback.
- Agile enables frequent iterations as teams work directly with customers to implement feedback and better understand expectations, facilitating faster response to changing needs.
- Agile promotes close collaboration among team members, stakeholders, and customers, fostering a more transparent and productive work environment.
- Agile allows for faster time to market as customers can see the product during the sprint demo and suggest changes.
- Agile is less prone to errors, with possible complications more easily identified earlier in the process.
- Agile incorporates customer input throughout development, addressing concerns and pivoting where needed to better match the product to the users’ needs. This results in significantly increased customer satisfaction.
Cons:
- Agile project management can be more complex to implement and requires a high level of collaboration and communication within the team.
- Without proper control and prioritization, Agile projects can be prone to scope creep, resulting in increased project duration and costs.
- Agile project management prioritizes working software over comprehensive documentation, which may pose challenges in highly regulated industries or environments with strict documentation requirements.
ServiceNow provides organizations of all sizes with the tools, resources, and features they need to ensure success within the Agile methodology. Built on the Now Platform, and part of the ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management product offering, the Agile Development application provides easy access to visual Agile management boards, preconfigured or customizable to meet specific needs.
Of course, not all projects can use the Agile approach; for those organizations for whom Agile isn’t an option or those who prefer the waterfall approach, ServiceNow solutions make it easy to guide development through every step. Finally, if you’re interested in a best-of-both-worlds approach, consider ServiceNow Hybrid Project Management. With built-in analytics, data visualization, and a centralized, single source of truth for all your departments and teams, you’ll have the reliable insights you need to create powerful software solutions—regardless of what project management type best suits your business.
Enjoy real-time visibility into development cycles and optimize outcome delivery speed. Track and orchestrate portfolios in a single view. Enjoy accurate planning, immediate work-level forecasting, a user-friendly interface, and more. ServiceNow make it all possible. Contact ServiceNow today, and take your projects further than ever before.