Principles and Core Values of Agile Project Management

When it comes to project management, you will come across tons of principles and methods that can help manage your work. One thing that’s gaining immense popularity today is agile. People can’t help but wonder if all this hype around agile project management services is real or it’s nothing but empty promises.

According to Pulse of the Professional 2018 report, 43% of the projects exceed the pre-determined budget, 48% of these projects are delayed, and 31% of projects fail to meet the developer’s goal. These statistics suggest the need for a robust project management tool that can guarantee efficient project management.

Before we discuss the four core values of agile and the 12 principles, let’s learn more about agile, its history, and how it works.

What is Agile Project Management?

Agile project management consists of the methodologies that streamline the software development projects and ensure that these projects are finished within the scheduled timeframe and within the budget. It enables the developers to collect feedback at every stage of the production cycle and make necessary changes to the software program.

Agile dates back to the 1990s when project managers realized that the old methodologies for work management were not working. They discovered that the traditional management approaches were inflexible and made it really difficult for the team to respond to changes. The biggest pitfall of these methods was that each software development project was outlined at the beginning. Once the project plan was determined, there was no way the team could make any changes to the original. It would either cost them a lot of money to introduce changes or delay the project.

Change is a vital element of any software development project, so it was getting harder and harder for developers to follow the traditional project management methodology. That’s when agile project management was introduced. This modern management methodology meant shorter product development time, a flexible framework, easy to deploy changes during the development process, and an interactive approach that supported regular feedback and testing.

Read also: How Is Project Management Affected By Work From Home?

The Core Value and Principles of Agile Management

Agile project management was initially designed for software developers, but its flexibility made it a popular tool for managers in every industry. Here are the four core values of this methodology:

• Individuals and communication will always be prioritized over procedures
• Working software is more important than comprehensive documents
• Customer collaboration instead of contract negotiation
• A quick response to the change

One thing that every core value has in common is the fact that agile project management is the customer-driven approach. The purpose of this approach is to build a product that offers the best value to the user.

Agile Management Principles

Here are the 12 main principles of agile project management:

1. Achieve customer satisfaction with fast and continuous delivery of the software
2. Implement changes even late in the product development process
3. Deliver software frequently
4. The company and software developers should work as a team on the software development project
5. Build the software for motivated people, those who have the ability to accomplish the job given the right system and tools
6. Face-to-face or in-person communication is the best and effective way to interact
7. How your software turns out to be is the only measure of your progress
8. A proper working pace is to be maintained
9. Excellence improves agility
10. Simplicity is important and it matters
11. The best product and designs come from the self-organized teams
12. Keep adjusting the way you work to improve efficiency

The goal of these principles is to provide customers with the best product that resolves their pain points and meets their requirements without exceeding the budget or the deadline.