Agile Project Management

Project managers from IT and other industries encounter difficult challenges when faced with continually changing requirements and environments. Traditional project management, which focuses on extensive planning and conforming to plans, leads to project management practices that are not flexible enough for the changing conditions on today's projects. Agile approaches to project management have been developed by software project managers to address this problem and these approaches have been growing in popularity (the traditionally oriented Project Management Institute has recently developed the Agile Certified Practitioner designation). While agile approaches hold much promise, they require new project management competencies, tools and techniques. They also are not equally appropriate for all projects. When agile approaches are used, they often exist within a structure of traditional business practices (e.g., business cases, project charters) and involve communicating with traditional business stakeholders.