Adopting Agile Project Management - Finance Sector

Adopting Agile Project Management is a Research Article I wrote in 2014 that is critical for business Agility today.

Adopting Agile project management into an organization always requires effort to be put into adequate and proper planning. To successfully defend the project from scope creep, PricewaterhouseCoopers (2014) say that emphasis should be put into clear definition of the scope and goals from the beginning. They continue by saying that the adoption of Agile project management should be iterative and flexible while giving attention to proper requirements gathering.

Adopting Agile in the Finance sector successfully: Agile Requirements Gathering

Requirements’ gathering is the ability to communicate the concepts and idea of all project stakeholders to the people executing the project from start to finish. According to Fernandes et al (2012) requirements and requirements gathering are the heart of a project because they determine the functionality and acceptability of the outcomes of the project.

According to Thomas and Kavitha (2011) agile project management brings along with it agile ways to gathering requirements like using case studies and user stories. They go further to introduce the INVEST model for requirements in agile which means that when making the user story it has to be Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Sized appropriately and Testable.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (2014) say that the key difference for agile methodology is the way iteration is done and the requirements gathering approach that helps increase communication between the business and information technology. In the traditional project management, analysis and requirements gathering are always bulky and long processes that can sometimes last a year because the project team spends time trying to define intricately how a system would function rather than start the work.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (2014) Agile provides a requirements gathering process that is high levelled because it defines what the project needs to deliver the outcomes that are necessary. The high level of this requirement process in agile allows also for the ‘’what’’ that is needed for the project to be available for early start and as the project progresses will be benchmarked and aligned against success factors and outcomes.

The DSDM Consortium (2014) explains that every requirement in the Agile project process passes through four typical process of (1) Elicitation (2) Analysis (3) Validation (4) Management and Documentation in the project lifecycle.

The diagram above segments the areas to which requirements gathering would be applied from the Pre-Project to the Post-Project stages. Each phase i.e. from the project objectives to (I)The Feasibility (ii) The Exploration and Engineering of the project cycle go through the Elicitation, Analysis, Validation,

Jalote et al, (2004) argue that speed is of essence in today’s businesses and as such an approach that is iterative is necessary were projects are expected to deliver at short cycles.