What is Agile Project Methodology?

What is this agile project management and how does it matters in IT industry? In this blog, I am going to throw some light on Agile Project Management. This blog is s about Agile Project Management, which is a set of simple practices, which can easily be understood by development teams and enable them to concentrate on the most important aspect of the project, "delivery of the product to the users". As we all know business continue to change at a rapid pace and in this entire process, we have always been in the midst of a chaotic business environment.

Today, every big and small organization relies on software, to be competitive and be successful. Well, it’s good news for technology / software professionals, but one should also note that today customers want the projects to be delivered as promised, on time and meeting or exceeding the quality expectations. In order to deliver any project well, as a project manager, you need to have a methodology or a process in place. According to Merriam Webster, a methodology is a body of methods, rules, and postulates employed by a discipline: a particular procedure or set of procedures.

Many organizations have been employing traditional development methodologies like Waterfall, Capability Maturity Model and others. However, in most of the cases it has been found these methodologies have not been able to deliver results in a typical short-cycle project. This is because, in most of the cases either they were predictive or they impose a disciplined & repeatable process, to increase predictability.

So, what type of methodology would help you and your team to deliver the product and satisfy the customers?

The methodology should be simple. The chosen methodology must be simple enough to enable the smart people to concentrate on business and technology and deliver products at a high speed. A methodology should be as simple as possible to get the job done. . One methodology that meets all these features is Agile Methodology. This methodology has helped many leading and mid-sized companies deliver results in complex project areas.

Agile places a lot of emphasis on teamwork. Customers & developers are on the same team. So, customers are always available to the developers for feature prioritization or product feedback. Simplicity is another essential component of Agile project. Simplicity provides a real value in high change situations. The team employs simple approaches in design and coding. It is very much people-oriented and empowers the developers. It is very suitable for a typical current day short-cycle project.

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