Software Development and Project Management
During last weeks there was active discussion around under the flag “Agile project management is not about project management but about software development.” I think the thread was started by Glen Alleman. Among interesting comments you can find his follow-up on the subject and two cents from Bas de Baar.
To make the long story short: I agree with Glen and Bas that things usually covered with the name “Agile Project Management” are telling more about managing software development which is usually important but not the one and only part of project management. By the way we tend to see project management as an area exploited in IT only while it is widely used in others areas of our lives (building industry is a great example here) which haven’t much to deal with computers and all those software stuff.
Yes, project management is usually much wider process than software development and definitely more complex. But why the heck the discussion mentioned above was limited to agile methods? The difference is the same no matter which methodologies you use to develop your software and to deliver your projects. Hey, replace the word “agile” with “waterfall” or “iterative” and all the arguments still work. That doesn’t really matter if you’re agile or not, software development and project management will usually be two different things.
2 comments:
I agree, that project management already exists regardless of the methodology.
Agile practices, however, introduce the need of managing these short cycles of development called iterations - Iteration Management.
On smaller projects, often a Project Manager is an Iteration Manager as well. Even on the outward looking side (towards the client) where a PM concentrates her/his attention to, the frequency at which the iterations play themselves may change a few practices around communication and the payload of the communication. Progress of the team is reflected using a bit more sophisticated yet meaningful concepts like velocity, load factor, etc.
So, I guess, what I am trying to say is that Agile requires to manage iterations and forces a PM to change their pace and nature of communication in a certain fashion. That's all there's to Agile Project Management.
Yes, when you develop software using agile methods it definitely has impact on a way you manage projects. And yes, that part of project management which covers software development must be adjusted to suit agile model (managing iterations as you point). However, the whole rest of project doesn't change much. It depends on project how big is the software development part within the project.
Generalizing a bit - project management always has to deal with different processes which are parts of the bigger whole (no matter if it is software development, hardware delivery or acceptance tests) and project manager has always adjust the his practices to to achieve a success. It really doesn't matter if you talk about agile or any other kind of practices.
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