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Agile for Traditional Projects

Agile for Traditional Projects

By Susan Parente
December 11, 2018

“Can Agile practices be incorporated with traditional project management?” This is a very common question today, and the answer is yes!

In this blog, I’ll cover two great Agile practices that teams have found to be valuable to incorporate on traditional projects, and which may help your team make the shift from traditional to Agile project management: A Daily Stand-up meeting and a Kanban board.

The Daily Stand-Up Meeting

The daily stand-up is used in Scrum, one of the most popular frameworks for implementing Agile. In this meeting, the project team members answer the following three questions:

  1. “What have I completed since yesterday that supports the iteration goal?”
  2. “What do I plan to complete today to support the iteration goal?”
  3. And lastly, “What are the barriers or impediments that are getting in my way in completing the work I have to do to support the iteration goal?”

This truly is a stand-up meeting, where all participants are standing. The meeting is time-boxed which means that it must end at the allocated time, generally 15 minutes. This forces people to prioritize what they talk about and to make sure they are efficient with the use of meeting time. (If you decide to have a daily stand-up meeting and let it run over 15 minutes, you’re not actually doing the practice of a daily stand-up, as it is a time-boxed event).

What you will likely find is in the first few daily stand-up meetings, not everyone will have an opportunity to speak; however, after a few meetings, people will figure out how to be succinct so that everyone has an opportunity to speak. It’s important for the Project Manager (PM), team lead, or facilitator in a traditional project to allow the team to work through this, as it is a part of the process of team development.

It is also important for the PM to take the lead and provide meeting support, but only to remind team members to focus on the three questions they need to answer (as noted above) and remind them if they’re getting off-topic with doing so.

Keep in mind that the purpose of the daily stand-up meeting is for the team to provide status to all team members, not to report to the project manager or the customer. Of course, it is valuable for the project manager to attend this meeting as the team facilitator; however, their role is more focused on listening and enforcing process than leading the team.

The Kanban Board

A project Kanban board, or task board, is used by agile team members to work through project tasks. The project sponsor need not know that you are using an Agile method, and neither do your team members. In some organizations, it can be worrisome to customers and team members to use ‘Agile’ if they don’t know much about it. It can be an intimidating change. Using the Kanban board has been very effective for teams that I have coached or led because the teams had multiple tasks that changed every week. It is an easier way to manage these tasks and to make sure they get completed in a prioritized order while being able to track who is working on which tasks.

As designed, a Kanban board minimizes the project work-in-process and allows the team to complete all of the project work, not knowing necessarily how long each task would take. As each task is completed, the team member who completed it updates the board and assigns themselves to the next prioritized task.

Other Agile practices that teams have found to be valuable to incorporate for traditional projects include:

  • Information radiators
  • War rooms (collocation of the team)
  • Team retrospectives
  • Burndown charts
  • Relative sizing/estimating
  • And others

What is nice about incorporating Agile practices while doing traditional project management is that you may receive some benefit from using these practices while your organization may not be ready for an Agile project management approach. As a PM, you probably have some authority as to how your development team works and are able to use some of these tools even without agreement from senior management, or from your customer.

By incorporating Agile practices into traditional project management, you can reap the benefits of these practices and also, in the meantime, educate your team and your customer on Agile practices so they are more comfortable with using them. 

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Susan Parente is a project engineer, consultant, speaker, author, and mentor who leads large complex IT software implementation projects and the establishment of Enterprise PMOs. An IIL Trainer and Consultant, Mrs. Parente is also an Adjunct Professor at Post University, Montclair State University, and the University of Virginia, and a principal consultant at S3 Technologies, LLC. She has 20+ years of experience leading software and business development projects in the private and public sectors, including a decade of experience implementing IT projects for the DoD. Mrs. Parente has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Rochester and a MS in Engineering Management from George Washington University.

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