The Agile Project Methodology: Flexibility is key

In today’s ever shifting business landscape, can anyone afford to remain stuck in the mud, sluggish and constrained?

Way back in “the before times” (more accurately a year or two before any of us had even heard the words COVID-19), I wrote a blog post extolling the virtues of the PRINCE2 project methodology having just gained my Foundation and Practitioner certifications. What with the world starting to reawaken, I thought why not pick up on my professional development and kick off some new training?

Adding strings to my bow!

Always looking to add more “strings to the bow”, as it were, I decided to branch out into a different project framework to give some comparison and see if it would provide any increased value to the way we roll out projects for our customers; enter AgilePM.

Agile, on the other hand, is far more reactive and flexible. With more of a reliance on collaboration, communication, and incremental delivery of value. In essence, quicker benefit more attuned to the immediate needs agreed by the stakeholders. Why wait until the very end of what could be a long-term project to see any kind of value at all, given those benefits could well have been desirable weeks or months ago, and might no longer reflect the changing needs of the business?

Whilst both methodologies most certainly have their place, and ideal use cases, across various industries and types of projects, their true power is unlocked using a topic shared across both, that of Tailoring. This is the idea that you can “pick and choose”, within certain parameters, what elements of the frameworks will provide the most advantage on any given piece of project work, and disregard (again, within certain parameters) those that won’t.

The best of both worlds

Having successfully gained my AgilePM Foundation and Practitioner certifications earlier this month, I’m very excited about now being able to bring the best of both worlds to our customers via a hybrid PRINCE2 Agile delivery method. Delivering the right value, at the right time, in a controlled but flexible and reactive manner.

To close off, the quote below encapsulates nicely my thoughts earlier in this blog regarding todays fast-moving business world:

Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react, and reinvent.

Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft

Share this post