Agile: the future has arrived! - Leadership Techniques

Agile: the future has arrived!

Peter Drucker cautioned that managers need to be concerned less about predicting the future and pay more attention to “The futures that have already happened”. Well it’s happened again; the future is here! Agile is out of the box and is no longer an arcane idea restricted to a radical cohort of software developers who claim to finally have the answer to on-time and on-budget project performance. The wide acceptance of Agile methodologies is evidenced by the Project Management Institute offering the PMI_ACP, an Agile-based certification, and the inclusion of Agile methodologies as a valid alternative on Federal contracts.
The major principle in Agile is to be able to deal proactively with continuously evolving inputs and goals. As requirements are amended, added, and updated…so must the project baseline be amended and updated. Agile is not coming, it is here. Whether you plan to implement a hybrid approach combining the positive attributes of traditional project management with agile concepts or your goal is to become a purely agile environment, you are sure to be exposed to agile over the next few months.
We encourage you to check out www.pmi.org this month. The home page leads to a couple of great, albeit short (thus adding to the greatness), articles about the challenges and rewards of introducing agile into a development environment. Is there an area of project management should we not be agile? Can Agile principles be applied in your environment? Definitely something to think about.
I’d love to hear more about your agile implementation. Is it pure or hybrid? Was it easy and well-accepted or did you have to drag your team members kicking and screaming into it? And most importantly – what value-add did the changeover provide?