Why Agile Project Management – Transitioning from Traditional PM to Agile

Why Agile Project Management? Transitioning from Traditional PM to Agile

6-7 minutes

Agile project management has gained ground as the new dominant development methodology in many IT projects in the last five years. The vast majority of organizations surveyed reported that they primarily use agile methods. The Figure below shows results achieved with Agile from an HP survey of over 600 IT product developers across multiple businesses. In fact, two-thirds described their company as either pure agile or leaning towards agile.

Key Reasons for Agile Adoption

Why have so many organizations moved to agile? The survey shows the key reasons for agile adoption were improving team collaboration and increasing software quality and customer satisfaction. 54% of the IT professionals reported increased customer satisfaction and 42% witnessed reduced development costs and shorter times to market in the survey, as shown in the Bar Chart below:

Transiting from Project Manager to Agile

A traditional project manager tries to control the project by allocating tasks to team members. Scrum master creates an environment that allows team members to pick their tasks. Scrum master guides the team to their success and works as a servant leader.

You need to give up your command and control mindset and learn ways to motivate the team and let them grow organically. The effective scrum masters are skilled at communicating effectively, they collaborate well, resolve conflicts within the team quickly. They let the team grow organically.

• Traditional project management is evolving with Agile. Enterprises are rewriting the metrics of your effectiveness as a project manager, to succeed in the new age roles such as Scrum Master requires
• A complete mindset shift, and
• Familiar with the Agile process such as Scrum, its roles, events (or meetings), and artifacts

Agile Mindset Shift

In Waterfall, the Project Manager takes a leadership role in leading the team and developing and managing the plan. But what about all those project management activities if the team is Agile?

• A project manager helps manage the project timeline, resources, and scope to meet business requirements. A Scrum Master, however, helps ensure the scrum team is successful.
• A Product Owner works with the customer and team to set direction.
• A Scrum Master is a coach and facilitator and coaches the development team in executing Agile practices to complete the work the Product Owner prioritizes.
• The Scrum Master works with the Product Owner and the development team to ensure the team members can move forward with development with no impediments, and that the Scrum practices are carried out.

Agile Scrum Framework

Scrum is a framework for developing and maintaining complex products through “view-and-tune”. It is a genre that follows the agile declaration and principles, integrating three roles, three assets, five events, five values, referred to as “3355“.