Back from vacations, the recently past year was an interesting one; full of changes and challenges. This upcoming year is one I’m very optimistic on; I see a lot of opportunities, discussion spaces and new fresh ideas coming up.

New Year: new blog post. This time, I’d like to write about one of the comparisons/competitions I hear the most in the agile world: PMPs in an agile environment.

Several times I hear questions or arguments from PMPs (I’m a PMP also) about how to implement agile, why agile doesn’t seem to fit on a PMI environment, and so.

There are lots of things going on in the PMI-Agile world, especially after mid-2009. A very interesting argument I heard so far is about helping PMPs change their minds and/or understand better the way agile works from a high level is:

Agile approach has three major areas:

  1. Engineering Practices
  2. Leadership Practices
  3. Project Management Practices

While focusing only on the Project Management Practices, we can talk about the so known “triple constraint”:

In any Project Management environment the most important variables to monitor when managing a project are: Scope, Time and Cost. (Also Quality, Client Satisfaction and Risk are; but for this opportunity we’ll focus just on the first three).

Traditional Project Management states that whenever you start a project, you start from the Scope. Once you have the Scope clarified enough you start playing with resources, assignments and sequence of activities, that will lead you to determine the Time it will take and the Cost it will have. Result: a pretty nice Gantt chart.

Then you go back to the business and/or sponsors; present the result and the typical reaction is: You’re asked to reduce Time and Cost. :)

Then, as a Project Manager, you start thinking about increasing the team, splitting the work in different phases, build things in parallel (increasing risk of course). The traditional challenge then turns into the traditional problem: very complex Gantt charts, with very complex dependencies that will require very hard coordination and tracking.

Instead, Agile Project Planning approaches the same problem from another direction; the starting point is Time + Cost:  How much money wants to be invested for how long? This gives you a team for a certain period of time, and the commitment to deliver the best possible amount of software.

That way you have:

  • A Fixed Cost: The team members 8hours of work).
  • A Fixed Time: Time boxes, iterations, releases.
  • A variable Scope: Then the Scope is the variable part of the triangle, which is injected into iteration after iteration and transformed into working software.

In my opinion, this is the clearest explanation on the different points of view from each of the approaches: traditional and agile ones. Don’t you?

Photograph by Yui Kubo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yu-kubo/398714467/