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It’s hard to find a project management method that’s made as much of an impact as agile. Companies across the globe are switching to this method because it shows results. Reports show that 71% of companies are now agile.
Do you want to learn more about the agile methodology and how to use it in your project management process? Read the guide below to learn the answer to your questions.
What Is Agile Methodology?
The agile methodology is a project management method that breaks projects into manageable chunks. Instead of handling the entire project at once without getting feedback from stakeholders and customers, you create milestones where you get feedback from users and business owners to determine if you’re going in the right direction.
This feedback is important because it gives teams clear milestones to work towards and a way to get feedback early in the process. These feedback loops allow you to find problems early and iterate on your project for a more polished release.
So, what does the process look like in practice? Let’s take a look.
Explain the Project Objective
The agile process’s first step is to define your project’s objective. Who are your customers, what features do your customers and stakeholders want, and what’s considered a successful release?
These objectives will help you determine the best way to plan your project and create milestones along the way. You’ll need them to create tasks and keep your team on the right track.
Define Your Scope
Once you have project objects, the next step is to create a project scope. It’s tempting to go overboard with a project and include every feature you can think of. But doing this is a mistake.
Your goal should be to create a minimal viable project and launch that for your stakeholders. These will be the features required to give customers a base to judge a product’s worth.
After you release your minimum project, you can collect requests and expand your capabilities based on the feedback you receive.
Create Tasks and Milestones
Your project scope will help you determine what features you need, so your next step will help you create tasks and project milestones. Break your project requirements into smaller pieces to give your team clear objectives.
Once you have those smaller objectives, you can create milestones for your project. These milestones will contain the tasks required to meet the milestone deadline.
Collect Feedback
Your goal with agile project management isn’t to create a huge project and take it to stakeholders and customers once you’re done. It’s to get constant feedback and learn about things you should change to meet demand better.
You’ll collect feedback at strategic points in the project development process. In many cases, this will be after meeting strategic milestones. Create demonstrations of what you’ve accomplished and send them to the right people for feedback.
Start Iterating
It’s an iteration process once you collect feedback. A scrum master will take the feedback you collect from your stakeholders and customers and develop a new roadmap to incorporate that feedback into the project.
This process will continue until you get great feedback from your testers. Once you get good enough feedback and have no major changes to make, you can continue to the next steps of the agile project management process.
Release Your Project
Once you get through the iteration process and complete all your milestones, it’s time to release your project. At this point, you should have received enough feedback to fine-tune your project and create something you know people will want.
Of course, the agile process won’t finish once you release your project to the wild. You will still miss things since you’re working with limited people. Your goal will be to continue getting feedback from the general public after your release.
From there, you can continue iterating on your project to create new features that make it better.
Benefits of Agile Methodology
Now that you understand what’s involved in the agile methodology, the question is, is it worth the effort? Here are a few benefits you’ll see when doing agile project management.
More Adaptability
One of the great benefits of being agile is adaptability. Since you’re getting feedback at regular intervals and building your project in chunks, you can make changes more quickly. If you have a monolithic project structure after spending a ton of time on it, it’s much harder to make those changes.
Better Product Quality
Product quality is another great benefit of investing in the agile process. As mentioned above, you’re getting constant feedback during this process. This feedback will help you find more problems and better tailor your project to what your customers and stakeholders really want.
Decreased Risk
Risk is another problem you can alleviate by working with agile methodology. Because you’re more adaptable and get better product quality from feedback, you take much less risk when you start and launch a new project. That feedback will make success more likely and allow you to take on projects that are otherwise too risky.
Invest in Agile Methodologies Today
Project management is much more than telling your team what to do and expecting them to stay on the same page. If you don’t have a system in place to keep everyone on track and offer employees what they need, you’ll find that many of your projects fail or fail behind.
That’s why the agile methodology is so important. It offers a framework to manage projects and gives your team a structure to keep them on the right track. Now that you understand what implementing agile offers your business, develop agile processes yourself or get agile consulting to help you get started.
Are you interested in more business management tips that will help you run successful projects? Check out more guides on the blog to find more ideas that will help you grow your company.
