Yes! Despite the naysayers, Agile is here to stay – coming to your projects slowly but surely.
We just completed our second ProjectTalks event in downtown Toronto and heard from four great speakers on change, business value in projects, emotional intelligence and Agile.
I would love to write about everything I heard but today I am going to pick the words from one of our speakers, Scott Ambler who proclaimed “Agile Won!”. That sure made the audience stand up and pay attention. Scott never disappoints when it comes to promoting Agile or pointing out its importance to many of our projects in the future.
What he didn’t say was that Agile would become a standard replacement for any other methodology available to us as project managers or business analysts. What he did say was that Agile won the battle for recognition and thus a place at the table within any progressive and smart organization.
Scott was talking to the BAs and PMs in the crowd – not to the organizations. His message was simple and came in five parts:
- Agile is here to stay and to keep up, we all need to embrace this practice. Anyone who denies the importance of Agile practices within our development areas, and elsewhere, has their head in the sand. Project managers and business analysts need to evolve as the practice of Agile grows within all our organizations. Evolve with it and grow with it. Stubbornness will not help our careers when it comes to Agile.
- Project managers and business analysts need to be more observant in regards to Agile practices and standards. Listen, learn and observe successes and failures as Agile is tested and used around us.
- Project managers and business analysts need to be flexible in their approach these days to managing and working within project environments. Agile, in some form, could very well offer a better approach to the complete lifecycle of the project or just a portion of it.
- And finally, Scott suggests that we should become comfortable with being uncomfortable. This is the key to working with Agile. It is not an easy journey for us, our stakeholders or team members but well worth the effort and time to make it happen.
Agile did win. But it was a one-horse race. Agile was challenged to become a force within our project environments and it has certainly done that.
Now it’s time for all of us to join the race.
Scott Ambler is the Senior Consulting Partner at Scott Ambler + Associates. scott@scottambler.com
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1 thought on “Is Agile Here to Stay?”
I agree wholeheartedly. Agile ways of thought have been around as best practices for ages. Staged/phased delivery, build models/prototypes to learn fast, the idea of learning as we go along rather than wait till the end. Agile ways of working and thought can work together with existing PM methodologies and frameworks – it’s all in the way the decision makers acknowledge that you can’t know everything in the beginning, you won’t get it all in the end and that change is inevitable along the way.