Thursday, November 6, 2014

The Best Fit Agile Project

Agile is emerged as a mainstream management philosophy and project management methodology.
Agile methodology is a broad based methodology and it has been tried & tested in virtually all kinds of industries and projects. Philosophically, it is the emerging digital management discipline; methodologically, what type of projects are better fit for agile?


"Agile" is rather a term used for software development. An agile process will give probability bests responses on cases with often changes and requests on customer business, because it is an adaptive process.  Agile, has also some context-related limitations. All you need to do is, tailor agile methodology to the kind of projects you wish to work on. As it is clear every project is unique by nature, agile methodology is also unique to the project. Although in software project it is predominantly used in Application Development (AD) projects and not in Application Maintenance (AM) Projects. Another current practice is to use agile in projects where the scope is not clear or changing, and use traditional project management methodology in projects where you have clear scope.

Agile is emerged as a mainstream management philosophy and project management methodology. The only projects for which agile is not suitable are projects where management and the team don't have the interest, capability or support they need to do agile. In particular, Agile is BEST suited when: 
- Business is very dynamic thereby requirements are changing very fast or new requirements need to be delivered very quickly 
- Business does not have a definite idea of the solution, and prefer to evolve it 
- Time to market is critical, and business is ok with a solution without the bells and whistles to begin with. 

Agile is useful for re-engineering; but complexity should not be very high and task can be break down to so small which can be developed in weeks. The application should be based on popular architecture, technology, design pattern, etc. so that developer should not require any research & development kind of work. In reengineering application, one thing is very good that requirement is freeze so it can be directly go to development phase. This is good for average complex application and mediocre size of application. You can also use the product backlog to manage the change requests and pair programming for distribute knowledge about practices and product. The ground rule is to clean and re-factor first any part that is the subject of a new change request. The main challenge is to have the proper engineering skills for such approach.

Agile fit is a significant digital fit, agile is all about iterative communication, incremental improvement and cross-functional collaboration, build the projects to create business values and enforce customer-centricity.

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