Agile Project Management

Sandali Wijerathna
4 min readMar 3, 2021

~~Project Management~~

When we talk about the project management, it is more significant in addressing the requirements of time, budget, and scope of a project. There are many popular project management approaches. Such as waterfall model, spiral model like that. These kind of traditional models are not robust enough to cater the demands according to the advancement of software development, technologies and business requirements.

Therefore, more flexible software development models were required in order to address the agility of the requirements. As a result of this, the information technology community developed agile software development models. In modern technology, we are mostly use this notable project management approach well.

Agile Project Management is one of the revolutionary methods introduced for the practice of project management. This is one of the latest project management strategies that is mainly applied to project management practice in software development. Therefore it is best to relate agile project management to the software development process when understanding it.

‘Agile’ is an umbrella term used for identifying various models used for agile development, such as Scrum. Since agile development model is different from conventional models, agile project management is a specialized area in project management.

The Agile Process

It is required for one to have a good understanding of the agile development process in order to understand agile project management.

There are many differences in agile development model when compared to traditional models:

  • The agile model emphasizes on the fact that entire team should be a tightly integrated unit. This includes the developers, quality assurance, project management, and the customer.
  • Frequent communication is one of the key factors that makes this integration possible. Therefore, daily meetings are held in order to determine the day’s work and dependencies.
  • Deliveries are short-term. Usually a delivery cycle ranges from one week to four weeks. These are commonly known as sprints.
  • Agile project teams follow open communication techniques and tools which enable the team members (including the customer) to express their views and feedback openly and quickly. These comments are then taken into consideration when shaping the requirements and implementation of the software.

Scope of Agile Project Management

In an agile project, the entire team is responsible for leading the team and not just for the project manager. When it comes to processes and procedures, common sense is used over written guidelines.

This ensures that there are no delays in management decision making and therefore things can move forward faster.

The agile project management function should not only be a manager but also demonstrate the leadership qualities and skills in motivating others. This helps to keep the spirit among team members and to get the team to obey discipline.

The agile project manager is not the “boss” of the software development team. Rather, this function facilitates and coordinates the activities and resources required for high quality and rapid software development.

Responsibilities of an Agile Project Manager

The responsibilities of an agile project management function are listed below.These responsibilities can change slightly from project to project and are interpreted differently.

  • Maintaining agile values ​​and practices in the project team.
  • The agile project manager removes obstacles as a core function of the role.
  • Helps the members of the project team to convert the backlog of requirements into functioning software functions.
  • Facilitates and promotes effective and open communication within the team.
  • Responsible for holding agile meetings in which the short-term plans and plans to overcome obstacles are discussed.
  • Improves the tool and practices used in the development process.
  • The agile project manager is the main motivator of the team and also plays the mentoring role for the team members.

Agile project management does not

  • Manage the software development team.
  • Manage the software development team.
  • Override the informed decisions of team members.
  • Instruct team members to perform tasks or routines.
  • Drive the team to meet specific milestones or deliveries.
  • Assign a task to team members.
  • Make decisions on behalf of the team.
  • be involved in technical decision-making.

I hope you get more idea about Agile project management approach by reading my article.

Thank you !

--

--

Sandali Wijerathna

Undergraduate University of Moratuwa Sri Lanka | Interesting in Web & Mobile Developments and UI/UX Designing