People often ask me whether Agile PM is a good fit for their project. In general, I tell them that delivering more value to your sponsors, sooner, with higher quality is always a good thing. However, pursuing those goals is not devoid of risk. I warn people about three key pitfalls when choosing to “go agileâ€.
Overhead
Agile PM is not for free. Many project managers assume that agile means no planning and no documentation. Imagine their shock when they find that a standard agile framework employs no less that 4 levels of planning (daily, iteration, release, project) and a full suite of artifacts called backlogs (product, iteration, impediment, risk). Complex projects need a certain amount of coordination to be successful, and an Agile approach is one that merely seeks the right balance of the right amount of process to manage those projects. However, if your project is instead a small, simple, low-risk affair, then the overhead may not be worth it. A certain investment of time and resources are required to implement the discipline and rigor that Agile frameworks require. Before you go Agile, be sure your project is sufficiently risky and complex to merit that investment.
Truth
Agile project management is not a silver bullet; it is a magic mirror. It does not fix your problems, but rather reveals your problems in such painful clarity that you are compelled to actually address them. When the complexities of a 1-year project are compressed down to a 1-month increment, there is no longer anywhere to hide. For example, if you have a talent problem, iteration deadlines will be missed consistently until you build more skills. If have a negative team culture, forcing people to work together across silos will cause more pain until you attack team dynamics directly. If you have a track record of generating defects, you will have more embarrassing customer demos until you implement tighter quality practices. Beware. When so many problems come to the surface, the PM will often get the blame for introducing this Agile craziness. Agile PM is designed to help project managers tell the truth with empirical data. As it turns out, people are often not able to handle the truth, and will instead shoot the messenger. Before you go Agile, be sure you are prepared to handle the truth when it is revealed.
Change
Those familiar with the WYSIWYG acronym (“what you see is what you getâ€) will enjoy another. WILIWIK: “What I like is what I knowâ€. Many people around us simply don’t want change. The pain of the known seems safer than the risk of the unknown. Methodology expert Alistair Cockburn has identified this as a human failure mode in project management. Anxiety will grip project managers when they learn the chosen agile frameworks does not explicitly highlight the project manager role. Annoyance will come from isolated ivory tower engineers who must now attend meetings with those pesky sponsors who pay our salaries. Protests will arise from requirements analysts who must now prepare feature specifications every month, rather than only once per year. Change is hard. Before you go Agile, be sure you understand the dynamics of the changes you are about to introduce.
Agile is not for everyone. Its overhead is best saved for high-risk complex projects; its truth-telling requires courage; it’s differences demand a disciplined approach to change. Understanding these pitfalls can make the difference between Agile failure or Agile success.
