What is Agile Project Management?

Agile project management is an iterative approach to manage software development projects that continuously focuses on the releases and integrates the customer feedback in every iteration throughout development life cycle.

Iterative or agile life cycles are created with several iterations or incremental steps on the way to the completion of a project.

Software teams that incorporate agile project management methodologies develop collaboration, increases their development speed, and adopt the ability to better respond to market trends. Agile project management focuses on providing maximum value against business priorities in the allowed time and budget.

Project Management in Agile in specific do not have a Project Manager. Roles of the Agile "Project Manager" would be shared among all the team members mainly the Product Owner and Scrum Master.

How are Agile Projects Managed?

In Agile development, scrum has an important role to say what exactly Agile project Management is. So, the scrum model would be used in the Agile development process which has three important roles -

1. Product Owner
2. Scrum Master
3. Scrum Team

The Product owner would be responsible to handle the Business aspects of the project by making sure that the right product is being built in a right way. A good Product owner would be the one who balances competing with the priorities, is empowered and available in the team to make decisions about the product.

Scrum master would act as the team's trainer by helping the team members to work together in a most effective way. A good Scrum Master would view the role as removing the obstacles form the project to progress, facilitating discussions and meetings and performing typical project management duties like tracking progress and issues.

Team would assume that agile project management roles to determine how to achieve the product goals.Team members would collaboratively decide which person has to work on which technical practices, which tasks are necessary to attain the quality goals that are stated in order to achieve.

Where does the Scrum Master fit in Agile Project Manager roles and responsibilities?

In Agile Project Management, Scrum master would be familiar as this generation's Project Manager. But, unlike the traditional Project Manager, the Scrum Master is not considered as a person to be credit for the success or blamed for the failure of the project.

Scrum Master's Responsibilities would be limited to the process. He is an expert on the process, and by using it to get a team in order to perform to its highest level. Scrum Master would not have so many responsibilities such as managing cost, scope, personnel, risk management which a project manager would do.

Who would handle conventional project manager duties in Agile development?

when we consider the case of Traditional Project Management, the Project Manager is the only one responsible in managing Scope, cost, Personnel, risk, communication, quality, procurement etc.

Agile project management would be helpful in situations where the product manager or the Customer's second guess of decisions would go poor. Agile would acknowledge that difficult situation and distributes all these responsibilities. So, by doing this each responsibility would be assigned to the person whom that belongs to.

Responsibility of schedule tradeoff and scope would be given to the Product owner. Quality Management would become a responsibility that is shared among the team, the scrum master, and the product owner. Other traditional roles would be assigned to the other members who come under Agile Project Management.

Advantages

In Project Management field, Agile would provide project teams, sponsors, customers, and leaders.

1. Faster deployment of Solutions.
2. Minimization of resources which results in reducing the wastage.
3. Increased Adaptability and flexibility to change.
4. By more focused efforts,success would be increased.
5. Quicker turnaround times.
6. Faster detection of defects and issues.
7. development process is more kind of Optimized.
8. A lighter weight framework.
9. Project control is optimal.
10. More focus on Specific customer needs.
11. More frequency of feedback and collaboration .