Agile vs traditional PM

During the past few years the term 'agile project management' was not only increasingly used in software development projects, but was often interpreted as a stark contrast to traditional project management (‘waterfall model’).

In our experience it is not useful to distinguish between the two descriptions; instead, a well thought-out combination of both approaches might contribute significantly to project success, considering that ‘traditional PM’ is not really defined.

Projects are by nature interdisciplinary activities, i.e. the application of agile PM methods will be useful only or predominantly in work packages actually assigned especially to software development.

Therefore, it is hard to imagine the benefit of using agile methods in project activities like sales, procurement or product marketing. Rather, the project manager should take care of integrating ‘agile islands’ and the ‘classical work packages’ to maximize the success of the project as a whole.

This approach was already implemented successfully by Riva Partners in complex development projects.