About Agile Project Management

Agile project management is a particular strategy used in the management of projects that strive to address projects that change quickly while effectively addressing the change. It promotes taking on projects as a team. With a focus on stakeholder interaction and communication, IT enables frequent and quick scope changes. This strategy is employed in software development initiatives. Such experiments focus on individuals who work simultaneously in an effort to mimic the impacts of crashing and tracking (R, 2010). One of the requirements of this approach is that the personnel should to try to track any changes arising throughout the life cycle of the project requires an efficient way to track changes throughout the project. The premise of the agile approach anticipates change requests being made that require a quick approval process and implementation time frame. It requires that project team members interact with project stakeholders regularly, weekly or even more frequently. It is important because as it allows quick changes to be made to the project as it evolves.

XYZ Corporation is one such company that embraces this project management approach. It is a large private-sector company headquartered in Adelphi, MD that focuses on government contracting. XYZ has approximately 700 employees. It focuses on three main service delivery areas including emergency management, health crisis prevention/response management, and related logistical, coordination, and collaboration services. The corporation derives approximately 80% of its revenues from services and 20% from products (hardware, software, etc.).





It is made up of the following four divisions:

Information Technology and Processes (IT management, Project Management Office (PMO).

Administration (Human Resources, Payroll,).

Emergency Management Service/Product Delivery (Marketing, Sales, Client Relations, Strategic Planning, Product/Service Development, Product/Service Delivery, etc.)

Health Crisis Prevention and Response Management Service/Product Delivery (Marketing, Sales, Client Relations, Strategic Planning, Product/Service Development, Product/Service Delivery, etc.).

The PMO is responsible for determining not only which projects are approved, but, as well, which project management methodology will be employed for each approved project. The PMO routinely considers two main factors in pairing a methodology with a project: internal unit fit for efficiency/effectiveness based on the use of methodologies in past projects, requests by unit managers, skills of available PMO/unit project managers, and other factors; and external business environment factors, such as business/technical sector, uncertainty, complexity, competition/opportunity, timeframe, technologies/processes/staff involved, etc.

This is the organization’s customized methodology adaption approach based on Agile PM best practices. All business units are encouraged to involve the PMO in projects as may be beneficial and per polices are required to involve PMO oversight in projects with over $100,000 annual budget., XYZ uses the PeopleSoft ERP across all divisions and an assortment of other Intranet and Internet applications built either on a Java or .NET platform internally



Best practices

The following are the five phases of a typical project management process; Initiation, Planning, Execution, Performance/monitoring and Project close. A project has a number of internal stages within each phase the internal phase are sequential and executed in a chronological order. Water fall model, commonly used in engineering and construction is considered to take up to 40 percent of the project time and budget. No new phase can start unless the previous one has been completed as it tends to follows a strict order of the projects. It has a strict order of the project phases and does not allow beginning of new phase until the previous one is finished.

The method works well for clearly defined projects with a single deliverable and fixed deadline. Thorough planning is required in waterfall approach to document the project and a tight control over the development process. In theory, this should lead to on-time, on-budget delivery, low project risks, and predictable final results. However, when applied to the actual software engineering process, waterfall method tends to be slow, costly and inflexible due to the numerous restrictions. In many cases, its inability to adjust the product to the evolving market requirements often results in a huge waste of resources and eventual project failure

Analysis

The XYZ Company has become a notch and one of the best performing companies in New Delhi due to its choice of the project management approach which is agile. The company’s profitability has increased rapidly as a result of this approach .The company’s flexibility, and productivity has been achieved through the approach. .The PMO of the company has also been instrumental in the growth of the company as it promotes promotes, develops, and maintains project methodologies and standards, and, as well, oversees all aspects of project implementation and governance for specified projects. XYZ could also employ water down methodology alongside agile project management approach, this would enable it improve on its operations

Conclusion

(Howard, 2006)Agile project management is approach is sometimes mistaken to be a single methodology. There are other series of methods that can also be employed in project management. Despite the fact that other methodologies exist, agile has often been used more due to its flexibility, speed and adaptability and productivity (Salo, 2008).































References

Howard, M. L. (2006). The Security development lifecycle. Redmond.

R, P. (2010). Agiwithle Product Management Scrum creating that customers lover.

Salo, O. A. (2008). Agile Methods in Europe embedded Software Development organisations:a survey on actual use and usefulnes of Extreme Programming and Scrum.