This Focused Performance Weblog started life as a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective, but is in the process of evolving towards primary content on interactive and mobile marketing. Think of it as about Focusing marketing messages for enhanced Performance. If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Agile Task/Process Mgmt vs Project Management -- Long time blog correspondent Glen Alleman has recently acknowledged an understanding of agile software development that's "dawning on him"...
"In a recent exchange on Agile Project Management, it has finally dawned on me that when the agile software development advocates speak of project management they are not actually speaking of project management. They are speaking of managing software development..."[Be sure to read the rest...]
Yup. Pretty much a similar conclusion I came to back in 2003, when I had time and energy to ponder such things (as well as a vested interest in promoting Critical Chain Project Management and its potential as a PM overlay for agile efforts).
"While on the subject, I've been recently trying to wrap my head around the various flavors of agile software development, and what they describe as "agile Project Management" (which has more of a sound of "task" or "process management" to my ears). There's been an excellent discussion of this in the Newgrange PM discussion list, which starts in the YahooGroups archive here."
"One of the things I think I'm seeing in Davids' book is a distinction between "agile" work methodologies and practices and project management that can wrap around them to make promises...a distinction that I've come to myself. The things that fall into the agile approach are about work/task management for a certain type of work, and don't really meaningfully address the promise-making and promise-keeping aspects inherent to project management."
Of course this assumes agreement that a major function of project management is about making promises, and understanding the health of and/or modification to those promises in an attempt to keep them.
"Agile Software Development" is a set of processes governing how software development tasks are organized and performed. But software development is only part of a project, even if it is a software development project.
View Frank Patrick's profile
