Today’s business climate is both dynamic and complex. Management faces changing requirements and increasing demands, as well as tight budgets and fast turnaround demands. Organizations are struggling to do more with less — fewer resources, including less money, and, in many cases a reduced workforce. Therefore, it’s essential to optimize every aspect of business, particularly project management. There’s no question that performance and outcome are on top of everyone’s mind — this is a reality for public and private sector entities, as well as for non-profits.
Traditional project management is task-driven and predictive; in other words, it assumes that circumstances affecting the project are predictable. Agile project management, on the other hand, operates well in a more fluid, more adaptive environment. Agile project management is a highly iterative and incremental process in which constant communication between the customer (end user) and the project team, which includes functions of project management and business analysis, is an inherent and critical element to success.
This paper highlights an approach for adopting the agile project management framework, identifies key challenges to implementing agile approaches, and showcases the roles of project management and business analysis in that context.