Project Planning In Traditional And Agile Project Management

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

In Project Management, the most important aspect is System development life cycle. It includes all the necessary phases in project development. "The system development life cycle (SDLC) is a conceptual model used in project management that describes the stages involved in an information system development project, from an initial feasibility study through maintenance of the completed application".

Typically, it includes various phases from preliminary development analysis to post-development, testing and evaluation. It also consists of the models and methodologies that development teams use to develop a system, which the methodologies outline the structure for planning and controlling the entire development process. There are two main methodologies in SDLC, which are currently utilized by most project managers; these are traditional and agile management.

In this essay, I will review the traditional methods and agile methods and also explain the advantages and disadvantages of both methodologies. Then followed by comparison of these two methodologies in details and critically analyze the main differences between the two approaches, and suggested some improvements in following section. Finally, the conclusion is presented.

2. Traditional Project Management

Traditional project management involves very disciplined and deliberate planning and control methods. With this approach, the project life cycle phases are easier to be recognized. All tasks are completed one after another in sequential order, and the significant part of the project is required to be planned right from the beginning of the project. For example, the project team needs to lay out the requirements, design and plan for the entire project, and they should not just increment components, so as to understand the full scope of the effort.

In traditional project management, the tools and activities are assumed to be well understood and the entire events that can affect the project are predictable. With this method, any phase that is complete it should not be revisited. The qualities of this method are that it lays out the sequential steps for development and emphasizes the importance of requirements. But it has limitations because projects follow the sequential steps and clients mostly can’t mention the requirements completely in the very beginning of any project.

A Traditional approach is based on sequential design that identifies steps to be completed serially. This referred to as the waterfall model. The traditional project management uses established methods and techniques in the management process. Many project managers have been developed these techniques and been applied in many projects for years. But traditional method is not a 100% applicable for some projects, for example software development. Therefore, there have been a few modern project management practices introduced to address the shortcomings of the traditional method. Agile and Scrum are two such modern project management methods.

3. AGILE Project Management

"Agile Project Management is a set of tools, templates, and processes for managing projects whose goal is clearly known, but whose solution ranges from partially unknown to almost totally unknown" (Wysocki, 2011)

The agile method is a modern development team to rapid build software that both efficient and effective. Agile is considered to be a light way methodology, unlike traditional development method its claims a flexibility, even in a situation where changing or in a big project requirement is seem to be denore. At the core of any agile project there is cross functional team professionals. These professionals include among others, project owners, software architect, designers, quality assurance and documentation experts. The project team works collaboratively using agile documented principles and processes to moved development project to a successful completion.

In Agile approach there are many rapid iterative planning and development cycles which allow a project team to evaluate the evolving product constantly and obtain feedback from users or stakeholders immediately. Then from what the team learns they would be able to improve the product, from each successive cycle. As the requirements are coming into reality this approach is giving a chance for necessary adjustments of the product. APM need full-time project team members to work together in the same location.

4. Critically analysis

After the overview on agile and traditional approaches now I’m going to critically discuss about the differences between the two methodologies according to my research.

There are many differences in agile project management when compared to traditional method, but I can say the key of the difference between agile and traditional approach is that the traditional (waterfall) method takes a classic linear and sequential way to software design system development. It utilizes the big design up-front ideas where you get all the major designs of the project are made at one time and the implement them later and then deliver it in what's known as the Big Bang. Now the Big Bang changed to greater flexibility and collaboration that agile project management provides. As each increment of the system is built, the team gathers input and learns from client’s feedback. Since the clients sees or may be experiences a working prototype, which would enable him redefine the requirements and describe to the team what they actually needs. The Agile method is ready to accept changes. This preparation of accepting changes reduces the cost of change because you already plan for it through iterative development. Making changes to a single unit is very effective in reducing the cost of changes, unlike after designing and developing the whole system and then try to change some requirements.

Apart from this major point, another factor that makes these two approached differ from each other is responsibilities among team members. The agile method emphasizes on the issue that whole team (i.e. project owners, software architect, designers, quality assurance and documentation experts) should be a working together tightly as a single unit. Effective communication is the thing that can make this integration possible. Therefore, meetings in a daily basis are held in order to identify the work that would be done in a particular day and accordingly. There are some communication techniques and tools that agile project teams are using which is giving the team members the ability to express their views effectively.

Early delivery is also one of the differences, in which agile has the facility to presents deliverable at completion of iteration, this main known as sprints (sprint is the basic unit of development in Scrum). "The sprint is a time-boxed effort, i.e. it is restricted to a specific duration. The duration is fixed in advance for each sprint and is normally between one week and one month" (Schwaber, 2004). "Agile management is about keeping the team energetic, empowering them so that they can deliver business values in a rapid and reliable fashion by engaging customers, and adapting to the changing environments/needs" (Sanjiv, 2005).

When comparing these two methodologies, another different issue we could have is that Agile does not creating a lot documents. Agile only produces the necessary documentation and the premium system architecture. Unlike the waterfall approach that requires a rigid documentation, and produce the finest system architecture after the requirement phase, then move on with the implementation and testing.

From this concept, we will notice that the key differences are: adaptation of change, responsibility, customer orientation and early delivery.   

5. Project Planning Tools

In project planning process, there are many tools and techniques that can be used in order to make the planning process easier, faster and more accurate. The project is planned up to a certain level. Project manager mostly use these tools in planning resources, time and budget sufficiently to estimate the project and effectively managing the risk that might be encountered during project execution. A failure in planning process reduces the chances of successful accomplishment goals, not only in project management but any achievement. According to observation planning is the most important everything, because "if you failed to plan, you plan to fail", this is normal.

Some of these tools and techniques for project management are: Risk Management, The Budgeting Process, Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), Gantt Charts, PERT, Critical Path Analysis (CPA), Resources Histogram and so on. Now I’m going to analyze Risk Management and Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) in more details.

Risk Management

The basic definition of risk is a "chance of bad consequences" (Oxford Dictionary, 1961). But in this environment, PMBOK Guide defined risk as "An uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on a project’s objectives" (PMBOK Guide 2004).

In project environment there is always a chance that undesirable condition may occur, which could cause the project to fail in meeting its planned quality. A project manager should consider the different tasks, activities and work to accomplish project deliverables, and determine any possible outcome could differ from the expected outcome. No any project manager would disagree with the idea of managing risk within a project. Risk Management is an essential part of any project management that have being giving a great contribute in obtaining successful product. All projects are different and the best way of identifying potential risks within a project environment is through experience gained from similar past projects. There are many areas of potential risks that can be the similar. The first thing is to draw an overview of the different areas of the project: Scope, resources, timescale, and cost, then take each section and break it down into details.

The Project Management Institute (PMI) A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) defines project risk management as: "The processes concerned with conducting risk management planning, identification, analysis, responses, and monitoring and control on a project. The objectives of Project Risk Management are to increase the probability and impact of positive events and decrease the probability and impact of events adverse to project objectives" (PMBOK Guide 2004).

"Some experts have said that a strong risk management process can decrease problems on a project by 80 to 90 percent." (Wrona, 2009).

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

"The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a hierarchical description of all of the work that must be done to meet the needs of the client" (Wysocki, 2011)

WBS House as Process-Orientated.tiff

The purpose of WBS is to help plan effectively for a project by breaking key task or activities into more manageable and smaller units of work.

WBS produces a detailed list of task to be performed for a project, helping to deliver better costing, scheduling and resource planning for a project.

During a project, financial control can be achieved by actual expenditure being tracked against each budget allocated for the different tasks assigned. Regular progress can be monitored using budget or time sheets, and control actions taken if appropriate e.g. the process of exception reporting.

For more complex projects with a higher level of detail, you can choose the following format for your WBS:

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6. Conclusion

Software Development Life Cycle is a methodology that depicts the entire development process, in which a software development organization ought to utilize to ensure a successful software development. While modern SDLC are divided into two main categories, which are traditional SDLC and agile SDLC. As discussed earlier, agile SDLC excels traditional SDLC. However, agile SDLC also has its disadvantages. While agile SDLC is more suitable for small-medium project development, it is still better to adopt traditional SDLC for large-scale project. Therefore, it is important that development team select a SDLC that best suits the project. There some criteria that development team could use to identify the desired SDLC, these include size of team, geographical situation, size and complexity of software, type of project, business strategy, engineering capability, and others where it may be found appropriate. It is also crucial for the team to study the differences, advantages, and disadvantages of each SDLC before hammer down the decision. In addition, the team must study the business context, industry requirements, and business strategy to be able to assess the candidate SDLC against the selection criteria. A SDLC selection and adoption process is crucial that it ensures the organization to maximize their chance to deliver their software successfully, therefore selecting and adopting the right SDLC is a management decision with long term implications.