Agile development has been around for a while now and has been gaining in popularity amongst development teams.
There are a number of misconceptions, however, with how to manage an agile project. One key misconception is that project management techniques are not relevant in an agile world. Agile developments, which are more fluid than traditional waterfall developments, need careful project management not careless project management precisely because of the risks inherent in the relative lack of structure. The tools required to manage agile projects also need to be flexible enough to deal with some of the key principles of agile, e.g.:

• Active and ongoing user involvement;
• Empowered user/developer teams;
• Time-boxed delivery of products ;
• Focus on frequent delivery of products;
• Collaborative approach amongst stakeholders.

Active and ongoing user involvement

Traditional waterfall approaches involve users at the front-end and back-end of the project lifecycle; agile involves users and stakeholders throughout the lifecycle. Key to this involvement is for users to be able to understand and participate in the project and how it is progressing. Typical project management tools can be complicated and difficult for non-IT professionals to understand and therefore participate. In contrast PM3 plans and tracks projects top-down, not bottom up.  The outcome-driven milestone plans developed in PM3 are high-level and are developed with the users and stakeholders actively involved. This collaborative approach to planning gains early ‘buy in’ by all affected parties and delivers a plan that is more achievable and more realistic. The key milestones are identified and agreed as ‘Post-Its’ in outcome-driven planning workshops and then entered into PM3. The plan can then be iteratively and incrementally refined (adding dates, dependencies, etc.)

Post-it approach involving users (PM3)

Empowered user/developer teams
Essential to agile is the notion that the teams are empowered to make decisions rather than having to wade through levels of management . Of course, there needs to be a balance here otherwise anarchy may prevail. One way PM3 addresses this is to define the responsibilities in a clear fashion so each team member knows his or her level of empowerment - often the empowerment is defined at a team level. This removes the danger of anarchy, but instils a culture of empowerment.

Time-boxed delivery of products
Agile is about delivering incremental, time-boxed products so that feedback and confidence can be gained during development. Milestones or drops of code are hit and the empowered teams make decisions on what conditional requirements can be de-scoped so that delivery dates are met. Key to this approach is the team doing its utmost to make the milestone drop code date. This may mean adding resources, de-scoping or doing a different set of activities. This can be very time consuming if detailed activity plans are constantly being amended. PM3 takes the top-down planning approach where a plan may only consist of 20-30 key milestones. These milestones do not tend to change a great deal although the underlying activities can. Keeping these milestones fairly constant gives confidence to the team including the users and saves constant re-planning. Nothing saps the confidence of stakeholders more than a constantly changing plan.

Extract of a simplified agile plan in PM3

Focus on frequent delivery of products
Traditional waterfall methods can result in long delays in the delivery of any work product to the users. It is natural that this long lead time with often no or little user involvement can lead to a lack of confidence in the stakeholders that the project will deliver. Furthermore, when the project does eventually deliver it could be that the business outcomes required have now changed over time and the end product is not what is wanted.
The other principles of active user involvement, time-boxing and empowered teams support this fundamental principle of delivering products frequently.
PM3’s milestone planning approach supports this principle.  Team members are given a fixed amount of time to develop something which has defined quality criteria (another principle of outcome-driven planning). How they choose to deliver these products may change and is left up to them.
Collaborative approach amongst stakeholders
We have already mentioned how PM3 involves users in the planning approach, but PM3 due to its non-technical language and high-level view enables stakeholders to be involved in key areas of the project including:

• Project status (Red/Amber/Green ‘traffic light’ reports);
• Risk and issue management;
• Outcome delivery (benefits management);
• Project accounting.

PM3’s online access means that all stakeholders can delve into the project progress and collaborate in a many project areas.

Summary
These are just some of the principles of managing agile projects. PM3 has been designed to focus on project outcomes just as agile does. Managing agile teams needs a different mindset to managing a waterfall development and it also needs a project management tool like PM3 that is designed for the agile world.