Agile Project Management: Myth or Reality?

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dhaughey
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Does anyone out there use 'Agile Project Management' techniques, does it really exist in the wild or is just a nice theory?
db1
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Hi,

I assume you are mainly referring to IT Project or Programme Management here other than, any other kind?

Agile techniques do exist "in the wild" however they are often criticised as being too developer focused, or "documentation-lite". My personal view is that Agile techniques have their place, as do traditional 'waterfall' methodologies. At a high-level, where a system or project is breaking new ground, such as the first release of a very new system, then an initial phase of Agile development is very useful. Users often find visualising the end system very hard, so an iterative prototyping phase is often a better to shape the main properties of a system, as opposed to a functional specification.

For established systems, incremental releases, then there is no benefit to Agile. The system is well enough defined to follow a traditional 'waterfall' model.

Regards

Duncan Brown
Novadian Limited
mattshearer
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Hi,
I've had a fair amount of experience with agile PM.

What area of business are you in?

Like db1 says above, an iterative approach to prototyping is very effective.

However, agile is also very useful for existing products, and infact that is one of its strengths.

SCRUM (http://www.scrumalliance.org) is used widely around the world.
It's especially popular in media areas at the moment, for internet projects among other areas.

If you have some specific questions, ping them over to me.

Cheers,
m
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