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Agile Project Management
‘Traditional’ project management methods pay some attention to ‘team building’ and recognize that effective teams increase productivity. It is still fair to say that the role of the ‘team’ is not too clear.
In Agile software development methodologies, and in particular in the XP – SCRUM, the team is at the centre of the methodology. Many practices are oriented at enabling the team and the project manager in reality becomes a coach.
A number of XP practices move individual responsibility to team responsibility, thus effectively enhancing the role of the team. The clearest examples of this are pair programming, collective code ownership and daily ‘stand-up meetings’. Programs do not ‘belong’ to the developer who wrote it in the first place and every team member can modify existing code.
Agile project management also focuses on achieving agreed on common goals. The team provides the estimates for the workload and so commits to reaching a target. These goals are defined in manageable terms, basically in achieving a set of functions by the end of the next iteration. The team has to deliver high quality; this turns out to be a prime motivating factor in making the team work and excel.
Other practices serve to provide fast feedback to the team. This is a major factor in empowering the team: the team and all individuals get all information they need to achieve the collective goal. The feedback pertains both to quality and to progress.
The role of the project manager changes to that of a coach: he or she ‘enables’ the project and removes obstacles to progress and productivity. The project manager does not assign tasks to people – the team takes care of that – but he does monitor progress, coordinates where needed and may come in as a referee.
In fact, although there are a number of technical reasons why XP and SCRUM work as well, the creation of high performance teams is probably the main achievement of this approach and the prime reason for its success, both in results and in job satisfaction.
