Agile: What You Need to Know About Agile Project Management, the Kanban Process, Lean Thinking, and Scrum

Agile

What You Need to Know About Agile Project Management, the Kanban Process, Lean Thinking, and Scrum

Table of Contents

Title Page

Agile: What You Need to Know About Agile Project Management, the Kanban Process, Lean Thinking, and Scrum

Introduction

Chapter 1: An Introduction to Project Management

Chapter 2: Agile Project Management

Chapter 3: Scrum Project Management

Chapter 4: Kanban Method

Chapter 5: Lean Thinking

Conclusion

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Introduction

Project management is the practice of guiding projects from their start to end while successfully achieving the project goals. Historical evidence suggests that project management has been in existence for centuries. Project management was limited to large and complex projects for a long time until businesses realized the need for smaller and simpler projects.

Different project management tools, methodologies, and frameworks have been introduced to help businesses and teams develop products and services successfully. However, every methodology, tool, and framework has its pros and cons. Traditional project management methodologies that were practiced until the 21st century were largely linear and sequential.

The limitations of such traditional project management methodologies often resulted in projects being late and costing more than estimated. There was an increasing demand for a new project management methodology in the software development industry to help teams deliver projects on time while adjusting to changing requirements of customers instead of avoiding them.

In February 2001, seventeen software development practitioners and experts gathered at a ski resort in Utah. The group would later go on to be known as The Agile Alliance. The outcome of the gathering was the introduction of the Agile Manifesto. This introduced four values and twelve principles that described a new project management methodology aimed at solving the challenges faced by the software development industry at the time.

Many software development companies embraced the core values and guiding principles. Smaller teams working on shorter development cycles, while regularly receiving feedback from customers, enabled projects to be more open toward change instead of avoiding it. Self-organizing and cross-functional teams made projects easier to manage, while team members took ownership of their increased productivity.

The software development industry embraced Agile, and it was not long before other industries started experimenting with Agile values and principles. Although Agile was intended for software developments, its values and principles could be applied to any team environment irrespective of the industry or the type of product or service they were developing. As a result, Agile methodology is increasingly used in many different industries with great success.

Scrum is an Agile framework that enables companies to adopt the Agile way of thinking without investing in prior experience and knowledge in Agile practices. While Agile does not provide steps to implement it, the Scrum framework provides clear steps on how to adopt Scrum practices making it easier for teams to adopt Agile.

The Scrum framework defines team roles, ceremonies, and artifacts that make it easier to adopt. Specific roles are given various responsibilities while Scrum ceremonies ensure that Agile principles of face-to-face interactions—providing customers with incremental versions of the product—and continuously improving as a team are achieved. Scrum artifacts provide the necessary documentation teams need; however, Agile methodology does not focus too much on documentation compared to traditional project management approaches.

The Kanban Method has its rules going all the way back to the Toyota factories in Japan, where it helped Toyota achieve high levels of productivity while reducing costs related to maintaining additional inventory. The Kanban method focuses on limiting work in progress where teams are encouraged to finish what they are working on before committing to new work. Teams are also encouraged to improve gradually, making Kanban very similar to the Agile way of thinking.

Lean Thinking is another philosophy that has many similarities to the Agile methodology. It focuses on helping processes increase productivity and profitability by reducing and eliminating wastes. Lean Thinking describes five principles that can be used to reduce and eliminate eight wastes resulting in the best use of resources. Lean Management has proven successful across several sectors and has fast become popular among many modern businesses.

Agile is a groundbreaking methodology that enabled teams to approach product development in an entirely different manner. It was able to solve many problems that the software development world was facing at the time and proved useful in many other sectors later on. Frameworks and methods such as Scrum, Kanban, and Lean share many similarities to Agile values and principles, but they are not the same. Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and Lean practices can be applied to different team environments depending on the projects, types of teams, and expectations involved to achieve project goals successfully.

Chapter 1: An Introduction to Project Management

Project management comprises time-sensitive goals assigned to a specific team and includes initiation, planning, execution, control, and closure of the project. Teams the world over, and across different sectors, use project management to achieve project-related goals with time constraints and predefined success criteria. These time constraints and success criteria are usually defined before the commencement of a particular project.

Scope, quality, time, and budget are the primary or key constraints of project management. In other words, the success of a project is gauged largely by how well it aligns with its expected or planned scope, quality, time, and budget. These constraints include the client’s requirements and expectations and those of the company or organization the project team belongs to.

Client requirements and expectations are usually gathered and documented before a project begins. A clear understanding of those expectations and requirements enables the project stakeholders to form the project team that will create the end product to meet the predefined client requirements and expectations. Therefore, proper gathering and analysis of client requirements and expectations play a key role in determining a project’s success.

A project is a temporary mission that is enforced to achieve a set of objectives during a specified period. Therefore, a project must have clear objectives regarding the product or service it will achieve. Furthermore, a project must also have a start and end date.

A project can create or make improvements to an existing product or service. A project can also be a one-time endeavor or an ongoing one. However, since a project needs to have a start and end date, an ongoing project is technically a project that repeats itself upon completion of its objectives.

For example, there may be a project where the objective is to manufacture a sports car according to strict guidelines in a month. The project team may complete the car in 29 days, bringing it to a closure. The same team might move on to the next project, which is the same: manufacturing the same car with the same requirements and time frame. Such projects are called ongoing projects.

Project management aims to utilize the resources available to a team to achieve project objectives without delays and to exceed the budget. The planning of resources includes personnel, finances, technology, and intellectual property. Project management also aims to meet predefined customer requirements and expectations while also facilitating some changes to those requirements and expectations along the way.

A project manager’s job is to use a suitable project management methodology to initiate, plan, execute, control, and close the project within the allowed time frame. In most methodologies, the project