Agile Development and Project Management

Agile development has become very popular for a number of reasons. First, it emphasises constant communication with the end client, throughout the development process but especially through the more contentious pieces.

This is said, not only to help limit scope-creep and increase customer satisfaction, but also to aid the project management control and success rate..

Ask any executive in any major financial institution these days and they will tell you that they support 'agile' '..because it allows developers to build and demo their results regularly.'

The customer can then keep tabs on development throughout the cycle, enabling you to correct as needed. Clearly, this means more effort and input from the customer, but in the end, it is infinitely preferable to the common misalignment or worst, the wrong product.

The Customer is King
Because the customer needs are constantly a factor in agile environments, development teams are more alert and more reactive. This helps them to become more engaged with the customers' experience and be more market-driven.

“The Agile PMO Role”Some years ago, around the birth of Agile, Tamara Sulaiman, a project management consultant, wrote an article entitled "The Agile PMO Role". In it she asserts that “agile teams are (or should be) cross-functional, self-organising and self-managing.”

So, with admirable characteristics such as these, it's no wonder that agile teams are so much in deman.