Mark C. Layton

Agile project management is becoming agile product development. Products are considered long-term, value-creating assets requiring permanent teams who iteratively elaborate, design, develop, test, integrate, document, and even support products until business outcomes are achieved. Agile product development focuses on continuous improvement, scope flexibility, team input, and delivering essential valuable outcomes.

Agile principles are designed specifically to increase the success of your projects. Agility in project management encompasses three key areas: Making sure the development team can be productive and can sustainably increase productivity over long periods of time Ensuring that information about the project’s progress is available to stakeholders without interrupting the flow of development activities by asking the development team for updates Handling requests for new features as they occur and integrating them into the product development cycle An agile approach focuses on planning and executing the work to produce the best product that can be released.

Agile approaches focus on customer satisfaction, which makes sense. After all, the customer is the reason for developing the product in the first place.While all 12 principles support the goal of satisfying customers, principles 1, 2, 3, and 4 stand out for us: (1) Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Scrum ensures transparency, inspection, and adaptation to enable a focus on continuous improvement, scope flexibility, team input, and delivering quality products. Scrum aligns with the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto, which focus on people, communications, the product, and flexibility.This Cheat Sheet outlines the main principles of the scrum project management method.

"Who is my customer?" is a fundamental question everyone must ask as they begin product development. Product development teams explore this question frequently, using product and customer usage data to see trends and watch industries and markets closely. Not clearly understanding who your customer is makes product development difficult and rudderless.

Agile is a descriptor of a mindset approach to project management that focuses on early delivery of business value, continuous improvement of the product being created and the processes used to create the product, scope flexibility, team input, and delivering well-tested products that reflect customer needs. © Followtheflow / Shutterstock.

Traditional approaches to project management focus significantly on processes, tools, comprehensive documentation, contract negotiation, and following a plan. Although agile product development remains dedicated to addressing each of these, the focus shifts to individuals, interactions, working functionality, customer collaboration, and responding to change.

Agile processes are different from traditional project management. Moving an organization from waterfall to an agile mindset is a significant change. Through our experience guiding companies through this type of change, we’ve identified the following important steps to successfully become an agile organization.