What Is Agile Project Management in Business?

When working on a project, you can take a variety of approaches to complete it. However, it is always best to set a course of action. Project managers often turn to specific models when sketching out their plans for completion.

Traditional project management models focus on five steps: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and completion.

Agile project management is another approach. There are often more than five steps with the agile project management model, but this doesn't necessarily mean the project will take longer.

In fact, your team could complete the project sooner. That's part of why agile project management is becoming common in many industries.

What is agile project management (APM)?

In the Agile project management method, you complete small steps, known as "iterations," to finish a project. A product of some sort typically follows an iteration, with clients immediately able to give their feedback on these products.

In the agile process, you move away from working on large projects for long periods without outside involvement. Instead, the goal is to focus on a series of smaller tasks that more deftly meet your long-term goals and your clients.

What is the difference between project management and agile project management?

Whereas the traditional project management and product development process follow a linear path, agile methodology is nonlinear and thus allows for deviance from an ordered set of steps.

APM comprises short tasks that facilitate quicker routes to product development and more frequent, thorough feedback from clients. In turn, teamwork and collaboration become easier since more feedback on more products is available.

Who uses agile management?

Agile management is most common in software development and IT. The iterations of an agile software development project result in client feedback along the way, so software developers can adjust small lines of code as a project develops instead of conducting a massive overhaul upon completion.

As any developer knows, changes to one line of code can set off a ripple effect of additional changes – a chaos sequence that agile project management helps to avoid.

Of course, agile management isn't solely a software strategy. It's becoming common in several industries prone to uncertainty, such as marketing, automotive manufacturing, and even the military. All these industries benefit from a key advantage of the iterative approach: building a solution in real-time instead of working toward an inflexible, predefined outcome.

What are the four core values of agile project management?

When implementing APM practices into your company's operations, start by transforming its four core values into the basis of all your workflows.

These are the core values, as outlined in the 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

Although the second core value mentions software, you can theoretically apply the logic of working parts over thorough documentation to any long-term project.

What is the agile project management process?

There are two primary models for the agile project management process: Scrum and Kanban. While there are differences between the two, their approaches comprise roughly six primary steps:

Project plans

Just as in traditional project management, you should at least set some basic frameworks – problems to be solved, possible solutions – before getting started. If you're using Scrum methodology, the Scrum master will lead the team in mapping this path.

Project maps

The map planned in the previous step should comprise each deliverable to be worked toward during an iteration. These steps should be defined in both the Scrum and Kanban methods, but only in Scrum should a firm timeline be set. In Kanban, you can instead use a Kanban board to manage your team's workload. Other project management tools will likely come in handy for mapping as well.

Deliverable dates

In this step, you can turn to your Scrum board to establish firm timelines for completing each iteration or use your Kanban board to get a rough sense of how long each task might take.

Division of labor

With your path and deadlines in place, assign work to each team member. Again, simplicity is essential, so you should evenly distribute the workload among your entire team. Visual workflow representations may help you achieve this goal.

Regular updates

To achieve the agile principles, commit to daily meetings where team members state what they've achieved and what's next for them. Keep these meetings brief, following the simplicity principle, but not so short that team members have no valuable information.

Client interaction

In the final stage of agile project management, the client joins. You unveil your iteration's deliverable to the client and determine how to implement any requested changes. You will also discuss workflow improvements and achievements to determine how you can improve your process on the next go-round.

Benefits of agile project management

These are some of the benefits of transitioning your company to agile project management:

Less uncertainty. Agile project management originated in the software industry because developers often identify a need and gradually figure out how the solution will look. The iterations and regular feedback of APM allow development teams to reshape their products to identify needs better efficiently. This results in a final product that requires fewer changes than it might have with traditional project management approaches.

Higher-quality products. With improvements and client feedback at every step of the way (instead of it all coming at the end), your products will be better suited to address the problems you initially identified.

Stronger collaboration. The six steps outlined in the agile management process make for improved, a more frequent collaboration between your team members and your company and its clients.

Fewer wasted resources. The simplicity principle of agile project management manifests as fewer employee hours spent working on a project, and your employees' time is among your most essential resources. So is money – and with more consistent client feedback, you'll encounter fewer instances of spending more money to fix mistakes you could have avoided in the first place.