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2003.May.15 Thu
Agile Project Management Paper and Statistics
Get a free copy of a Cutter Consortium report: "Agile Project Management: Principles and Tools", by Jim Highsmith, at http://www.cutter.com/offers/APM.html. Forty pages, well worth reading (and a "$150 value!").
A few quotes from that report:
On agility: "We are no longer talking about 15%-20% scope creep on projects; we are talking about everything - scope, features, technology, architecture - changing within the span of six months.... The traditional project management maxim of 'conforming to plan' fails dramatically in these situations."
On traditional project management, he quotes someone in the construction industry saying "The ... PMBOK... is based on two underlying theories: management-as-planning, ... and the thermostat model... both theories can be shown to be heroically simplistic and insufficient from the point of view of project management reality."
Highsmith describes the "agile project management model" with a graphic that I'm trying to reproduce in text form here:
Traditional project management focuses on activities, while agile project management focuses on delivery. Highsmith writes "Teams that focus on activities get lost, and even worse, they often don't realize it. Earned value analysis ... has nothing to do with value but with cost accounting based on planned tasks versus actual tasks. The value of what those tasks actually deliver gets lost."
Cutter also has a survey paper here that I summarize below:
Survey of 200 IS/IT managers
Location
Industry
Heavy Methods in use...
Agile Methods in use...
This article predicts that 50% of companies will have some agile projects "by 2003".
The bit about CMM and ISO-9000 as heavy-weight methods is a bit confusing, since compliance with those standards doesn't necessarily require forgoing an agile process.