Agile Project Management

The author states that Waterfall Project Life Cycle Model has limited applicability in today’s complex, interconnected, interdependent and interrelated business processes. Projects in reality do not follow the exact steps, sequential flow or requirements of traditional project management. It is not feasible to address current pressures of change, global competition, dynamic technologies and increasing complexity by following the steps in the waterfall model. Billions of dollars have been wasted on failed projects. It is not possible to ignore the growing number of poorly executed as well as cancelled projects. To overcome these problems, an alternative approach of Agile project Management has emerged. APM is a highly iterative and incremental process which follows Agile Project Life Cycle Model. It consists of initial requirements, fast iterative planning, constant evaluation and reviews. I was particularly impressed with the visual control component of Agile management .It ensures that every member of the team views the project the same way.
Another important element is that APM development is executed collaboratively with a small co-located team. All the key team members including the customer/end-user work on one location. When a user cannot be involved on a full-time basis, the business analyst can represent the user while the full-time core team continues to work together. This practice also facilitates the feature driven development of a project. It is possible to incorporate and implement some of the components of Agile management in a traditionally managed project.