The Agile Project Management Office Essay

Agile team tries to build a product that meets the customer’s intent rather than the detailed description provided in the traditional methods, thus in the Agile PM customer becomes one of the team guide and member.

Identify the main purpose and mission of a PMO and what are the main challenges and obstacles in implementing a PMO? (HBS: The AtekPC Project Management Office)

In order to achieve successful results within established time-frames and budgets, project managers are likely to employ methodologies models. A project methodology is a model that aids managers to plan, design and implement their project goals. Project methodologies are helpful to project manager in any field, for instance, Niel Nickolaisen CIO at the Western Governors University, is an advocate for the agile software development methodology. As these models grants flexibility when dealing with stipulations and scope changes on a project. Needless to say the agile software development methodology is just one example of a varied assortment of methodologies, each with their strengths and weakness. As such, it is up to the project manager to decide which methodology fits their needs, as there isn`t a one fits all solution.

The Agile Methodology Principles makes the development much faster because the primary importance is given to the customer satisfaction and continuously delivers product. Even though requirements change at the ending phase the product is developed. The Agile development insist the self-organizing team which can create requirements, best architectures, best models. The Agile development promotes a distinct way of thinking to build things and methods to deliver continuous improvement of product. It facilitates to make best practices and decisions together. It a development to promote the adaptive planning, continuous improvement, evolutionary development and delivery, and required time to complete work. It encourages for rapid response to change in the whole development cycle. The project team prefers agile development to move in a creative and quick way. The project progress also depends on working software and project environment and support is provided and built by the individuals. They promote the sustainable environment. Constant attention is provided to the technical excellence and best models are given by the agile methodology. This principle helps the project team members

AteckPC faced some obstacles and challenges while implementing PMO. There was a lack of existence of formal project management (PM) in the organization. AteckPC’s management recognized the need for formal PM. However, moving from non-formal PM to formal PM created many cultural barriers. Many of the staff including managers perceived project management as something that will get in the way of doing their job. Therefore, there was resistance to change coming out of the employees. Some were having a lack of experience with formal PM, and others were missing the knowledge in how to deal with some software tools. Also, there were some employees who found the flexibility and informality appealing. Even the IT staff preferred the informality since

What is Agile? What is Agile Project Management? Agile is “not a methodology. The Agile movement seeks alternatives to traditional project management. Agile approaches help teams respond to unpredictability through incremental, iterative work cadences and empirical feedback. Agilists propose alternatives to waterfall, or traditional sequential development” (Agile Methodology). Agile Project Management on the other hand is, “continuous improvement, scope flexibility, team input, and delivering essential quality projects” (Agile for Dummies).

Agile methodologies promote a structured project management process that encourages self-organisations, accountability and teamwork. These are the best practices that allow customer needs and company goals to be developed through rapid delivery of high quality software and a clear business approach. The software development is based on iterative development that consists of various procedures (cPrime, 2016).

Agile development and project management has its roots in the Information Technology world. A large portion of the information that follows in the next two chapters refers to IT related development and projects. That being said, Agile is not limited to IT and in fact the model is expanding well beyond strictly IT.

An organizations strategy should not significantly change when trying to fit the PMO into an agile framework. “A PMO provides many key components to an organization including governance, compliance, risk management, mentoring, and financial, planning, change and resource management. Are these things only needed in a waterfall environment? Of course not, it is also used and needed in an iterative and agile lifecycles, so what is the difference?”3 It is simply a matter of balance, the lifecycle will determine the amount of each that is needed and which component is required is controlled by the PMO. Compromise is needed and in the case of agile, you see this compromise with a slightly slower approach. Changes are required, but they should not be so great that it requires an organization to make significant strategic modifications.

The purpose of this report is to define and discuss the use of agile methodologies. Agile is becoming a more popular term within the information technology industry and this report will help those unfamiliar with its techniques understand how agile works. The goal is also to inform the readers why agile can be preferred over traditional methods. While reading this report, it is recommended to keep in mind that agile is an alternative to using the traditional systems development lifecycle method.

Whilst CDO’s and agile PM methodologies have been an effective solution in the long term, one of the major drawbacks with this is that it can be very costly and difficult to implement, whilst also yielding minimal results in the short term. Over the last few years, agile has become recognized as a mindset and not just a PM methodology used for software development. For agile to be truly effective, it requires a whole organizational transformation in addition to support from senior leadership who can help drive this digital transformation across their distributed teams (Reference). There is also a very short supply of executives who possess a strong business acumen and in-depth knowledge of technology, making

Agile project management lets software project managers and employees alike adapt to changing circumstances, rather than try to impose rigid formal controls, as in traditional linear development methods.

Agile project management focuses on continuous improvement, scope flexibility, team input, and delivering essential quality products. Agile project management methodologies include scrum, extreme programming (XP), and lean, among others. These methodologies all adhere to the Agile Manifesto and the 12 Agile Principles, which focus on people, communications, the product, and flexibility.

Different methodologies are used nowadays by a project manager to achieve their project goals. Although all the methodologies have common process for management but their execution differs. In this paper my intention is to discuss the most commonly used project management method called Agile. This methodology is commonly used in software projects because of its iterative development way and its flexibility for a requirement changing environment like in the case of a software project where the requirement keeps on changing as the project progress.

In addition to flexibility and responsiveness, Agile project management focuses on continuous planning, execution, and feedback. Agile methods are designed to adapt quickly to changes; whereas more traditional methods focus on planning the future in detail. Agile methodologies are able to more efficiently bring advances to a project (City A.M., 2015). Research shows that agile methodologies are increasingly popular because it helps employees avoid delivering a wasting time completing a project that is later realized to be the complete antithesis of what was truly needed (Pozzebon, 2015). In short, “agile methodologies enable you to do is deliver something quickly but then adapt it and change it at a given point in time based on what you now know and what you 've already implemented” (Sunday Business Post, 2012)). Agile is juxtapose to traditional project management. Traditional project management methodology is focused on the sequential lifecycle of a project, referred to as waterfall. Waterfall projects are common in the construction of infrastructure such as the construction of a bridge, electrical substation or a highway. The waterfall