Running head: AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT – BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES

Agile Project Management – Benefits and Challenges

Deepa Kurup

Sachin Kala Sidhardhan

Research Paper for ISM6316.001 Project Management

University of South Florida

Summer 2015
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Contents

Abstract ......................................................................................................................................................... 2
Basics of Agile methodology, focusing on Agile Project management ........................................................ 3
Overview of Agile Manifesto ....................................................................................................................... 5
Agile Practices and Methods ........................................................................................................................ 8
Benefits of Agile Project Management ....................................................................................................... 11
Scenarios where Agile Methodology is recommended ............................................................................... 14
Challenges of Agile Project management ................................................................................................... 15
Scenarios where Agile Project Management can fail ................................................................................. 17
References ..................................................................................................................................................... 0
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Abstract

Agile project management and methodology has gained prominence in the last few years,

especially in the Information technology arena. The growing popularity was mainly attributed to

the limitations of conventional methods like the classic Waterfall model, along with the lessons

learnt from the challenges and problems faced by real project scenarios in the recent past.

In the modern business world, where requirements are very dynamic in nature owing to

the stiff competition and rapid advances in technology, the agile development was designed to

provide better business value and reduce the overall risk associated with the IT industry. Agile

practices rely on continuous planning and feedback mechanisms and hence live up to its name by

being more adaptive in nature than other proven methodologies. Owing to the periodical

measurement evaluations and meetings, the process provides better visibility into the progress of

the project and hence it believed to address customer needs in an adept manner.

Many of the agile evangelists treat the method as a philosophy. Agile has been growing

out of Information Systems field onto other areas of business due to its proven track record and

growing popularity. Even with its record, agile is not completely fool proof and cannot be

considered as a ‘one-size-suits-all’ kind of process. It has its own drawbacks and areas where it

might not be the best fit.

Through this research paper, we are attempting to revisit the basis of Agile methodology,

its principles and techniques. Using real project scenarios and data, the strengths and weaknesses

of Agile methodology are evaluated. Our findings imply that Agile methodology can be a

success or a failure depending upon certain variable of a project including complexity,

magnitude, nature and team experience.

Key Words: agile, project, process, management, methodology, benefits, challenges

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Basics of Agile methodology, focusing on Agile Project management

What is Agile?

Agile Project Management is defined as an iterative and incremental method of managing

the planning, design, development, building, and testing activities for a project in the fields of

Engineering, Information Technology, or Systems Development. According to Richet (2013);

Agile approach can be leveraged effectively for software and non-software products and for

project management in general, especially in areas of innovation and uncertainty. The end result

is a product or project that best meets current customer needs and is delivered with minimal

costs, waste, and time, enabling companies to achieve bottom line gains earlier than via

traditional approaches.

Karelesky and Voord (2008) also give another reason for the existence of Agile Project

management. According to them “Projects Change. This simple fact is not due to fundamental

lack of planning or incompetence on the part of the project manager or software developers.

Rather, change is an inherent characteristic of any growing entity.” They go on to claim that

projects are living things, and thus they adapt to their environment. Since the environment

surrounding any project can change, the project and the project team must change along with it.

Moreover, the project itself “learns as it grows, and must change in response to that learning.”

Traditional Project Management and methodologies have a tendency to view Change as

negative. They consider Change and rework as the most expensive aspects of development, and

as such, attempts to severely limit or even prevent change, through extensive requirements

gathering, documentation, up-front planning, and customer sign-offs.

A diagrammatic comparison of Agile and Waterfall Methodologies of Project Planning is

given below:
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Figure 1: Comparison of Waterfall and Agile Processes © ScrumAlliance

Conversely, Agile Project management views project failure as the most negative aspect

of development. It realizes and accepts that Project Changes will occur, and hence provides

mechanisms to manage that change, while continuously delivering pieces of the project.

Where and how did Agile start?

Agile Project Management, as well as agile development, is founded on the values and

principles of Agile Manifesto (2001). It is a grassroots movement started by software developers

after many years in the industry, and experiencing many project failures. Back in the 1990s,

software projects had a horrific record of coming in late and over budget. In February 2001, a

group of seventeen software professionals gathered at the Snowbird resort in Utah and discussed

what the failed projects had in common, and discuss lightweight development methods. Aguanno

(2005) states that Agile Project Development was created as “an alternative to documentation-

driven, heavy-weight, software development process.”

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Spread of Agile Methodology

Though agile methodology was initially used mainly by the Information technology

business world, it has spread to other arenas as well of late. The graph below depicts the reach of

agile project management in different arenas as per a survey conducted by VersionOne and

Scrum Alliance group.

Figure 2: Industries that implement agile project management © 9th State of Agile Survey

Overview of Agile Manifesto

Beck, et al (2001) in their Agile Manifesto put forward four key values and twelve principles that

serve as a guide to Agile Software Development. The Manifesto states:

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“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do

it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over Processes and tools

Working software over Comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over Contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left

more.”

© 2001 Agile Manifesto

The meanings of the manifesto values above are:

• Individuals and interactions: self-organization and self-motivation are important, as are

regular, preferably daily interactions between the individuals of the team.

• Working software: working software is more useful than just presenting documents to

clients in meetings. This can also help the customer refine their requirements better, and

increases the likelihood, of delivering a product that is not only on budget, and on time, but gains

user adoption.

• Customer collaboration: requirements cannot be fully collected at the beginning of the

software development cycle, therefore continuous customer or stakeholder involvement is very

important to deliver a product that is actually valuable to the customer.

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• Responding to change: It is a well-known fact that it is almost impossible for customers

to fully document all the requirements they may have for a given project. Moreover, these

requirements may change between the start of the project and final implementation. Agile

methods are focused on quick responses to change and continuous development requirements.

For Agile projects, Change is not a bad word.

Agile Principles

The Agile Manifesto is based on twelve principles:

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous

delivery of valuable software.

2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes

harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of

months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and

support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a

development team is face-to-face conversation.

7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.

8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and

users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

10. Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.
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11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing

teams.

12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then

tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.

Agile Practices and Methods

Over the past few years, many Agile methods have emerged, and are followed in different

industries. While these methods share much of same Agile philosophy, characteristics, and

practices, they also each have some unique tactics and terminology. As the popularity and

acceptance of Agile has grown in industry, so have the number of practices and methods. The

diagram below depicts many of the practices under the agile umbrella. Describing all these

practices is outside the scope of this paper. Hence, here we have summarized a few of the main

Agile methodologies:

Figure 3: Agile Practices © VersionOne

Agile Scrum Methodology

Scrum is a lightweight Agile Project management framework that can be used for managing and

controlling iterative and incremental projects of all types. With this method, a “Product owner”
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works closely with a team to identify and prioritize a “product backlog”. The product backlog

consists of features, bug fixes, requirements, etc. With priorities being driven by the Product

Owner, small (usually no more than seven members) cross-functional teams are assembled to

create and deliver “potentially shippable increments” of results during successive sprints, where

the sprints are typically recommended to last for two to four weeks.

Lean Methodology

Lean Software Development is an iterative agile method that was originally developed by Mary

and Tom Poppendieck. This method focuses the team on delivering Value to the customer, and

on the efficiency of the mechanism that delivers this value, called “The Value Stream”

The main principles of Lean Methods include:

 Eliminating Waste

 Amplifying Learning

 Deciding as Late as Possible

 Delivering as Fast as Possible

 Empowering the Team

 Building Integrity In

 Seeing the Whole

Lean methodology eliminates waste by selecting only the truly valuable features to put in a

system, and then prioritizing amongst those selected. Lean concentrates on the efficiency of use

of team resources, as well as fewest possible intra-team work flow dependencies. Lean also

provides decision-making authority and ability to individuals and small teams, since research has

shown that to be faster and more efficient

Extreme Programming (XP) method

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XP was originally created by Kent Beck, one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto. XP is based

on four values – simplicity, communication, feedback, and courage – and twelve supporting

practices:

 Planning Game

 Small Releases

 Customer Acceptance Tests

 Simple Design

 Pair Programming

 Test-Driven Development

 Refactoring

 Continuous Integration

 Collective Code Ownership

 Coding Standards

 Metaphor

 Sustainable Pace

Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)

DSDM, originally developed in 1994, is an agile project framework that uses the MoSCoW

prioritization of Scope into Musts, Shoulds, Coulds, and Won’ts to meet the constraints of the

project, namely time, and budget. There are eight principles underpinning the DSDM approach.

These are:

 Focus on the business need

 Deliver on time

 Collaborate
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 Never compromise quality

 Build incrementally from firm foundations

 Develop iteratively

 Communicate continuously and clearly

 Demonstrate control

Benefits of Agile Project Management

According to the CHAOS Report by the Standish Group (2014), 31.1% of projects get

cancelled before completion. Further results also show that 52.7% of projects have had budget

overshoots of over 189%. Studies show that the waterfall method of project management was

was the largest contributing factor for failure, being cited in 82% of the projects.

Another study by the same group found that four out of the five key factors contributing

to project failure were associated with and aggravated by the waterfall model, including inability

to deal with changing requirements, and problems with late integration.

These findings reveal the shortcomings of the waterfall model and tag it as an inefficient

was to build a product or software. Hence, a major portion of the industry has moved onto

implementing agile alternatives.

Major goals which companies seek when preferring Agile over other methods.

The below data was obtained from the 9th State of Agile Survey conduction by Version One.
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Figure 2: Reasons for choosing Agile by Industries © 9th State of Agile Survey

Listed below are some of the accepted benefits of agile methodology in software development

process.

Faster-to-market: The Agile development methodology promotes the concept of early and

regular roll out of the product through iterations and beta demonstrations, which in turn results in

hitting the markets early.

Enhanced Quality: With frequent sprint retrospectives, and continual improvisations through

iteration, agile process is designed to produce better quality products. The methodology also

defines proactive methods to prevent product problems and also has tools and methods to support

the vision.

Improved customer satisfaction: Due to the continuous customer engagement and high

visibility on the process and progress, the end customers experience better satisfaction. The

product owner and up-to-date product backlog are crucial in this procedure, and it also helps to
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accommodate changes in a quick manner. The customer also gets a feel of the working product

after each sprint demonstration cycle.

Improved team morale: An agile team is found to be more innovative and creative due to the

self-management, visible knowledge sharing principles implemented.

Flexible team structure: Unlike conventional teams, agile teams are more flexible to take

decisions in the size and components of a team, owing to its self-management nature. Agile

projects are noted to have multiple scrum teams on the same project which provides

opportunities of addressing customer needs better through customization.

Strong relevant metrics: The time, cost and effort estimates used by agile teams are more

relevant and more accurate than metrics on traditional projects. Usage of metric data like the

sprint burndown chart is a classic proof for this.

Improved performance visibility: The agile process stresses on regular status meetings, daily

sprint reviews and progress monitoring which enables all members of the team to monitor

progress and performance.

Improved project predictability: The use of techniques like static sprint length, same team

allocation, and metrics allow the agile project teams to predict timelines and budgets for future

projects with more accuracy.

Risk reduction: Agile mechanism was proposed to nullify the probability of ultimate project

failure. Relying on a working product from the very first iteration enables the customers to

perceive the outcome and then work on the changes by giving constant feedback.
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Scenarios where Agile Methodology is recommended

In today’s business world, agile project management can be adapted to technically all

kinds of projects. Nevertheless, listed below are some of the features where agile method is more

favourable than other strategies:

 Dynamic Requirements - With the brisk competition which companies face today,

it is more than likely that the requirements might not be clear cut, though the

project might be. Agile becomes the silver bullet here, as the process is defined to

show a working model to the customer so as to perceive and confirm.

 Iterative Nature - The initiatives which are iterative in nature also fall into the best

fit category, as Agile itself is iterative in nature. Most of the product development

efforts fall into this category. The delivery is done in the form of small increments

eventually.

 Interactive Philosophy and Active User Involvement - For projects with these

factors, agile is certainly recommended. User and product owners play a major

role in deriving the final outcome of the project.

 Skilled, Same Team -As agile methodology focuses on delivering the required

changes in a fast and efficient manner, it is imperative to have a skilled team. And

if that team remains unchanged for the entire project duration, it’s an environment

where agile can thrive on.

 Acceptable cost of failure – This factor is almost a pre requisite to agile project

management. Working on an iterative model, there should be some space planned

to accommodate failures.
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Challenges of Agile Project management

The last edition of State of Agile Development survey (2014) reveals the fact that around

94% of IT organizations surveyed implements processes based on agile methodology. Though

this is an impressive percentage, agile processes are still not considered as the magic potion for

all software development projects. There are multiple challenges faced while putting this theory

into practice. Listed below are some of the major challenges:

Communication in Distributed Environments: With globalization being the buzzword, a good

portion of the projects today work in distributed and outsources modes. Agile is designed to

thrive on cases where the stakeholders and production/development happens at the same

location. This raises a challenge for a geographically distributed team to run their daily Scrum

calls. The difference in time zone and other factors like language or culture just adds on to the

complexity.

Developer’s Skill and Motivation Levels: Agile emphasize on daily or periodic reporting

which is crucial to create the feedback loop and track the progress of the project. Sometimes the

developers feel uncomfortable as this can turn to a type of micromanagement. Their deficiency

in technical or communication skills can be exposed in such a scrum meeting where things work

in a judgmental way.

Stress on Social Skills of the Team: Most of us have come across excellent developers, who lag

a bit in their communication. Agile might not be the dream environment for similar people, as

the process requires them to interact within the team and also to the customers on a regular basis.
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If they are not really able to express their thoughts accurately and efficiently, this will cause a

major challenge to the system.

Lack of business knowledge in the team: When the size of agile team or the complexity of the

software increase, there is challenge of keeping each developer updated on the business

knowledge which is mainly acquired from the business team or client directly on a usual day.

This impact is more for agile, as each team member is considered as a complete expert in his

domain area.

Hybrid of Waterfall and Agile process: Since higher management usually likes to see a plan in

hand, most companies today attempt to create a hybrid of Agile and Waterfall models. In this

method, they usually create a plan based on classic waterfall model, but let the development

team work in an agile model. Most of the cases adopting this form have seen conflicts between

the development team and management on the true essence of the process and on reporting.

Inefficient Customer Feedback Process: Agile methodology thrives on a feedback process to

see the output of what was made and suggesting the modifications on what is further needed.

This basic process requires the team to know who the real customer is. (In some cases it is the

Product manager, sometime Business/User groups). Any confusion on this role and duty

definition can create scope creep, conflicts, ignored inputs, wishful programming and many more

issues.
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Scenarios where Agile Project Management can fail

Listed below are some scenarios where Agile project Management has a very high

probability to fail.

 The trust factor – Not trusting the team or the agile process. This is mostly a

management side issue and can lead to other repercussions like micromanagement

tendencies.

 Lack of leadership and blame on the process – While agile teams are designed to

be self-managing, they still need good leadership to drive them. This is usually

expected in the form of a visionary product manager who gives ample freedom to

the team within the limit.

 Ignorance of Agile Practises – The procedure is built upon a set of practices. If the

team and management lose faith in the same, the practices might go for a toss

which can lead to the downfall of the project.

 Delivery Failure during Sprints or Iterations – If the team continually fails to

deliver what was committed for iterations, then the very foundation of agile will

collapse.

 Lack of Cross-functional Teams – Agile process recommends splitting and

managing teams in a cross functional way, so that they are self-sufficient within

the team and can work independently without reporting or task related issues. An

example where this can fail is when a management puts all developers in one

team, and testers in another.

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 Large Teams – For large projects or programs, this is a main challenge. It is kind

of practically not efficient to have everyone work and report daily in the scrum

meetings for example. Larger teams need more overhead communication efforts

as well.

 Customizing Agile Practices – Customizing agile practices is fine to a limit. But it

can be catastrophic if the customization is done without fully understanding the

underlying agile principles.

 Lack of efforts for improvisation and adaptation – Companies are expected to

improvise and adapt to modern technological practices despite whatever process

they are following. If the team is not doing this, agile can face challenges of

delivering on time with quality.

Running head: AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT – BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES

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