2.3 Agile, or Light, Project Management

There has been quite a bit of attention paid to light, or agile, methods as a solution to the specific problems of projects involving information technology. The Wikipedia [7] notes, Agile Methods evolved in the mid 1990s as part of the reaction against high ceremony methods, like Rational Unified Process (RUP), Prince and ISO 9000. The processes [that] originated from those methods were seen as bureaucratic, slow, demeaning, and contradicted the ways that software engineers actually work. Proponents sometimes characterize these approaches as Lean project management. The symptoms of the problems leading to these approaches were those described in Chapter 1: extensive cost and schedule overruns and failure to deliver error-free scope on most information-technology projects. Light methods for information-technology projects include such methods as

1. Rapid application development;

2. Joint application development;

3. Extreme programming;

4. SCRUM.

Detailing these methods is beyond the scope of this text. I can t avoid a certain skepticism about some of the claims that lead to proposing the light or agile methods, such as conventional project management does not work for information technology projects. I have not heard people objectively skilled in professional project management (e.g., certified PMPs) make these claims. For example, David Anderson [8, p. 55] notes,

The traditional project management model focuses on locking the scope for a project and negotiating or varying the budget (including people and resources) and the delivery date. The PMI and ISO-9000 models for project management are based on this paradigmK[and] created...