Get the Agile advantage for your project By Stephanie Oley

Whether you're considering Agile project management or another approach, chances are that effective project management will be critical to the success of your next project.

How to run your next project – Agile project management or waterfall? Whether you're developing an organisational change, public works project, marketing campaign or educational transformation, chances are that effective project management will be critical to its success. For many teams, Agile offers a proven way to manage complexity and uncertainty.

Such complexity is characteristic of most projects. However, according to the Project Management Institute, the world is seriously lacking in project managers with the right skills. The Institute estimates that demand for this skillset will almost double by 2035, with an additional 30 million project managers required on top of the current headcount of 40 million.

Equipping project managers with the right skills, support and time allocations is critical to the success of any large and complex project, according to CCE facilitator Marshal Alkouz.

'It's not enough to just assign a project management role to team members with an already-intensive workload. Project management is a job in itself, not just a form of admin to complete after you've managed your day job,' Alkouz says.

Where to start in project management – mindset or mechanisms?

Before deciding on the details of where to start, practitioners should consider project management across two fronts: its core philosophies, and the tools or frameworks available.

Agile is the first of these, being an approach rather than a prescriptive methodology. (Read our related story on PRINCE2® to learn about an increasingly popular framework). In Agile project management, practitioners learn to deliver work through iterative development, customer collaboration, rapid feedback loops and continuous improvement.

Agile differs from traditional methods by using iterative cycles rather than a strictly sequential process. Inspired by Toyota's Kanban system of the 1950s, it involves a series of short, iterative work cycles called sprints. Each sprint involves its own cycle of iterative testing and development before the resulting work can be deployed or fed into the next sprint. Risks and wastage are reduced, and the end product improved with the Agile approach.

However, according to Alkouz, Agile is more than a mindset. 'It means engaging constantly with the end user, or their representative, especially at the beginning of each sprint and throughout the project. Agile prioritises the customer or customer representative (product owner), who knows the product best,' he explains. Essentially, Agile project management allows a product to develop iteratively, when the team discovers a need or feature that will add value to the end user.

Best uses for Agile project management

Agile originated in the world of software development, where the end look of a product may remain elusive until the customer is finally using it. However, Agile is now increasingly applied to settings including HR, marketing and communications, government policy development, and learning design.

A known Agile case study is PayPal, which some years ago had become disorganised and bottlenecked. Delivery of new products was lagging. In 2013, the company launched its 'Big Bang' transformation. Adopting Agile Scrum to replace its incumbent waterfall approach, PayPal established more than 400 cross-functional teams to deliver the work in two-week sprints. Within six months, PayPal had successfully delivered 58 new products including mobile payments and PayPal Credit.

Just as training was critical to the speedy rollout of Agile at PayPal, an introductory course in Agile project management can help all teams to deploy its concepts effectively. Training also helps to spotlight misunderstandings and incorrect approaches you might currently be using.

Once practitioners understand its principles, a further step to consider is Agile Scrum Master Certification, an internationally recognised qualification offered here at CCE.

Emerging trends in Agile

Learning about Agile will also put practitioners ahead of the game when it comes to learning its many emerging capabilities. These include:

• Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) – learn how to deploy new technology for tasks such as scheduling, reporting and resource allocation
• Embracing change management skills – improve your ability to align all parties on regulatory, technological and other changes
• Rise of hybrid methodologies – broaden your overall skills, for example by learning how to pair Agile's flexibility with a more predictable waterfall approach such as PRINCE2®
• Enhanced data analytics – practice using new features for tasks such as forecasting, performance tracking and risk prediction
• Incorporating soft skills – find out how Agile can support stakeholder communication and emotional intelligence, including by spotlighting team mental health
• Supporting remote teams – see the functions that help remote and distributed teams to collaborate more effectively.

Project management is a sophisticated field. The more exactly practitioners can pinpoint requirements, the better the outcome.

CCE's at-a-glance table provides an overview of project management course options, with further detail available for each course.