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Hello. I'm Mike Clayton
and I'm the founder
of online PM courses,
which is an online
learning platform for
project managers who want to
learn all about
project management.
In this talk, we're
going to look at
the principles of agile
project management.
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Let's start by considering
what we mean by agile.
Agile is a way of thinking about
delivering new
products and there are
a number of different project
management methodologies
that we can describe as 'agile'.
That's why in this talk,
we're focusing on
the principles,
but a better description
of agile might be
adaptive because agile methods
adapt to the business,
they adapt to the
customer and in
particular they adapt to
the situation as it
evolves over time.
Critically embedded in
the agile approach is
the idea of incremental
development
and iterative refinement.
Incremental means
a bit at a time.
Unlike traditional predictive
project management,
we don't seek to define
the whole outcome of
the project right at the
start and commit to it.
We figure out what we
need first and then
we develop it and then we
think about what we need next.
An iterative means that we
develop in a series
of iterations.
Each iteration may
be anything from
one to several weeks and in
those iterations we refine
what we've got or we
build something new.
So, agile project management
avoids a rigid plan
and a strong emphasis on cost
and schedule management.
Instead, it replaces it with
a constant reevaluation
of what's next.
The agile alliance has a
nice definition of agile.
It describes agile as the
ability to create and respond
to change in order to succeed in
an uncertain and
turbulent environment.
By that, they mean that
agile projects are ideal
where we can't be sure what
the end product
needs to be today,
either because we can't
reasonably design the end product
today or because circumstances
are actually going to
change and we know it.
If we did design the
end product today,
then at some point, we'd
realize it's wrong.
Not surprisingly therefore
agile project management
approaches are
most commonly used in
technology projects.
It's best suited to projects
with high levels of
uncertainty because it fosters
a much higher degree
of innovation,
adaptability, and creativity.
Agile project
management originated
