We live in an era where every industry out there faces neck-wrenching competition, which is why essential aspects of businesses like project management have become one of the most important pillars of success in any situation. It doesn’t matter whether you are running a small business or a large business; your entire system will be dependent upon project management so that all the projects can be successfully delivered.
Now, there are many different project management approaches, and you will have to make sure that you are choosing the right one. Well, currently, agile is on the top of the list of project management approaches and people from several industries are actively looking for ‘What is Agile project management?’. With the help of an agile approach, you can streamline your project while reducing extra effort.
To make things clearer for you, we have a list of differences between agile project management and traditional project management.
Understanding traditional project management
This type of approach, in most cases, is linear, where every phase of the project moves on in a sequence. You should also know that the concept of traditional project management depends totally on experience and predictable tools such as AI project management tools. It doesn’t matter which type of project you have; it will always have the same life cycle, including different stages like planning, designing, testing, building, support, and much more.
In this case, the whole project is planned upfront, which is one of the most important reasons why there is no scope for changes in the project’s later stage. The requirement is always fixed in this case, while both time and cost are variables. But because of the approach’s rigidity, it can never be used for large projects, one of its most significant limitations.
What is Agile project management?
On one side, the traditional approach focuses only on upfront planning and factors like scope and cost along time. On the other side, the agile project management approach mainly focuses on teamwork, flexibility, and customer collaboration. In this type of approach, considering customer feedback is very typical, which is one of the most flexible approaches you can use to streamline the overall operation.
One of the basic ideas behind agile project management is that it motivates changes to improve the outcome instead of planning upfront and leaving no space for changes. So, we can say that adaptive planning is one of the main pillars and uniqueness of the agile approach, and this is why it has been so successful.
Why is agile being preferred over the traditional approach?
Now that you have understood what agile project management is, it’s time for you to know why modern-day firms prefer agile over the traditional approach. Managers and developers mostly prefer agile because of many reasons.
If a project is in a volatile knowledge work environment, then there is less likelihood you can complete it successfully through the traditional approach. In contrast, on the other side, the agile project management approach is considered ideal for uncertain, knowledge work projects.
In addition to this, large projects are hard to be dealt with using a traditional project management approach since everything is planned in the case of a conventional method, and thus, making changes becomes near to impossible. But when you are using the agile project management approach, making changes will become a pie for you since the whole agile approach is based on flexibility and changes.
It doesn’t matter which type of firm you are running. If you want to make your project management approach your firm’s strong side, it’s more efficient to start using the agile project management approach, especially in today’s turbulent world.