Project Management and Agile

Recently, I found a controversial topic while reading some blogs, about how Project Management and Agile differ from one another. In my experience, there is not such a difference, but rather, one complements the other, because Agile represents a previous, baseline stage, referring to more essential human structures, in contrast to Project Management, which provides tools and knowledge to optimize the experience. Let me explain why.

First, let's define what Project Management is. Project Management is the use of specific knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to deliver something of value to people (PMI). In other words PM gives you many resources that you need to address a successful project.

Giving more context, the traditional way of leading projects was created by PMI and it is known as the waterfall framework.

Agility is a way of thinking and working that is aligned with the agile manifesto principles and values. Thus, every activity that we perform is aligned with the agile manifesto.

Going deeper into the analysis of this concept, if we want to be aligned with the agile manifesto in every aspect on a daily basis, and not die trying, it needs to become a habit. By making it a habit means that, unconsciously, the actions we do are aligned with the agile manifesto. This is why I consider Agility as a previous, baseline stage, because it focuses more on people's behavior rather than just giving them some tools to work with.

Next, I want to present the relationship between Product Development and Project Management. To explain it, lets see the image below:

Product life Cycles are addressed by projects. In other words, we need projects to create a change in our products, so we need project management concepts like scope, time and budget to manage them.

So, let's put these definitions in order. Product Development is the lifecycle that a product goes through. We go through each product stage (Creation, Growth, Maturity and Retirement) through project management, but Agility is the one that defines the behavioral and cultural agreements, as well as the tools that are aligned with the Agile manifesto.

Probably you are familiar with Scrum, it is the most relevant agile framework. We have to take into consideration that it was built from the agile manifesto, in other words if you are not committed with the basis probably you can not do a successful Scrum.

As the guide said, Scrum helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems. If we take a look, Project Management and Scrum share the same purpose, to deliver projects successfully. So both can be used to create value but the choice to use one or the other depends on how much we know about the scope and the technology to be used. See graphic below:

Wrapping up, there isn't such a difference between Waterfall and Scrum, depending on the context where the project is evolved.