OM in the News: Keeping Up With the Agile Craze

When you are covering Chapter 3 (Project Management, p.67) you will find The Wall Street Journal article (Aug. 13, 2019), “Keeping Up With the Agile Craze,” a great article to share with your students. Agile denotes a set of tools long used in Silicon Valley to keep complex software projects from falling behind schedule and becoming obsolete before they are done. Now, says WSJ, it’s spreading to other products and services buffeted by rapid change.

Agile practices include: (1) breaking big projects down into a series of smaller tasks: (2) meeting daily to report progress and eliminate obstacles: and (3) completing tasks in time periods called sprints. When applied wisely, agile principles save time and speed teamwork on projects that are complex or have an uncertain outcome. The approach requires big changes in the way people work, however. That means learning to work on self-governing teams and take criticism before a group without turning defensive. At worst, agile devolves into a swamp of annoying jargon and tedious rituals.

Some 75% of North American employers are using agile practices according to a survey of project managers by the Project Management Institute. Agile techniques can speed productivity by 20% to 50% and improve the quality of products and services. But the principles need to be tailored to fit particular teams, their mix of work and the company culture.

A GUIDE TO AGILE JARGON

Scrum: A popular framework for putting agile methods into practice.
Kanban or scrum board: A display showing one sticky note for each task in progress, aligned in separate columns based on their status—to-do, doing or done.
Waterfall method: A traditional method of organizing projects, moving an entire body of work in steps from planning to designing, testing and launching.

Backlog: A prioritized list of everything that needs to be done to complete a project.
Sprint: A work period of a fixed length, usually 1-4 weeks, that ends in a demonstration of work accomplished.
Stand-up: A meeting held at the same time every day when team members report on work completed, tasks planned for that day and obstacles in the way.

Classroom discussion questions:

1. What is the difference between agile and waterfall projects?
2. What are the advantages of the agile approach?