Last updated on: 02/05/2017

Agile Methodology has emerged as a great alternative to traditional project management methodology, like Waterfall. Agile is predominant in IT and software projects since it allows to adapt to rapidly changing business environments. Unlike traditional project management, Agile calls for producing and delivering work in short bursts, also called sprints.

Gathering all the requirements before the development team even starts writing the code puts your software at a great risk of being not in line with current market demands and become a failure. When you decide what your product should be in the very beginning, you tend to ignore important iterations that must be made during the development lifecycle, thereby preventing your final product from being the right fit for the market.

A plethora of project management methodologies are available in tech market, however, for the success and timely completion of a project, it’s imperative to choose the one that fits your business requirements and empowers the product development to keep the pace with changing client demands.

Key characteristics of Agile Project Management

• Empowers developers to self-organize the task

• Enhances learning, knowledge sharing and communications among team members

• Emergent behavior to deal with uncertainty

• No detailed documentation and calls for just enough planning

• Continuous product refinement via regular iterations

• Constant feedback, research and creativity

• Faster completion of projects without compromising on the quality of desired product

• Maximum ROI

Agile project management is a boon especially to IT field because time determines the fate of your product. Since IT has become a fast-paced world, months have been reduced to weeks, and weeks have been reduced to days. If you take too long to develop a software, chances are high that the requirements for it change drastically by the time it is finally available for use, which makes Agility a matter of paramount importance. Agile enables the development team to work faster by dividing tasks into different sprints and incorporate innovation and uniqueness in the development process.

Limited documentation in Agile project management also improves the pace of a product’s development lifecycle. Instead of long documentation that nobody has time to read, Agile calls for increased interaction among team members, customer feedback, imagination, coding, testing and new ideas. These factors result in appropriate response to a change rather than following a plan that has prerequisite measures and no room for dealing with a change. Unlike traditional project management, Agile paves the way to adapt to even last-minute changes.

source: http://www.softwareadvice.com/

The biggest reason for the immense popularity of Agile is its basis - It’s not possible to determine all the tasks going to be required for completion of a software project up-front, design an architecture upfront and get all the requirements upfront. Agile is built upon the belief that constant feedback cycles, research, undisrupted interaction and creativity allows the plan, the requirements and the architecture of a project to gradually emerge. As a result, the end-product meets not only the client’s need, but latest market demands too.

Although Agile project management has proved to be a great help for IT managers, nearly 48% of US project managers use it for non-IT projects as well.

source: http://www.adfkickstart.com/agile-methodology

Since Agile project management is the best fit for businesses that have continuously changing environments and highly complex situations, it is often deployed in ever-evolving software development companies in India. However, non-IT managers have also begun to use Agile for project management as even they find it difficult to articulate requirements without seeing a tangible product first. Agile ensures production of a quality product that flawlessly meets client’s requirements.

If you have ever used Agile and have additional inputs to add, please share them in the comment box below.