The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management, 5th Edition

Chapter 10Managing Agile Development with Scrum

Introduction

If you could travel back to 1999, the end of the twentieth century, log on to the Internet and visit Amazon.com, you'd find a much simpler website and business than exists today. Yet, if you have been a regular Amazon user since that time, there is probably no point that you remember when “everything changed.” Instead, they changed their services and the site operation incrementally.

Incremental delivery has many characteristics that are similar to a traditional understanding of projects. Something new and valuable is delivered by a team working together under a timeline. But there are also differences. In the Amazon example, one can envision many independent teams that relentlessly improve the features and functionality of the website and the associated customer-facing services. The change is so constant and never-ending that it doesn't fit the traditional paradigm of a project that can be approved, defined, planned, executed, and closed out.

In Chapter 3 we established the advantage of incremental delivery as an approach that made sense for developing products where high uncertainty exists. Each increment of delivery creates a feedback and course-correction opportunity. In these cases, there can eventually be an end to the project, when the customer decides that what has been delivered is sufficient for meeting the business goal.

So how do we manage these not-quite-projects? Agile is a framework for incremental ...