So most people have worked on a project whether delivering one, or being on the receiving end of one. Your ideas of project management may vary depending on the results, but most likely if you had a bad experience you have a negative view. This was most likely because the project wasn’t managed, whether that was poor communication, late delivery or even poor quality delivery. That is why all our projects are based on agile project management. What is Agile Project Management, is it another buzzword of the day I hear you ask? No, the official definition is

Agile project management is an iterative and incremental approach to delivering requirements throughout the project life cycle. At the core, agile projects should exhibit central values and behaviors of trust, flexibility, empowerment and collaboration.

So what does that really mean? It means we break every project into small tasks, with a flexible attitude, responding to change. This requires agility, and good communication between all parties. To achieve this we have built a custom client management system, designed to assist in communication, feedback and tracking.

Agile Project Management Methodology

The key part of Agile is the iteration process to make sure that any problems that come up are resolved and identified. When put into the typical waterfall type framework that looks something like this.

The key to every step is communication, communication, communication! It can’t be said enough that most issues with project management fall down to misunderstanding or the lack of updates. So that is why we make sure we have a detailed specification recorded, broken down into manageable chunks, or tasks. Each of these tasks has a feedback stage and sections to upload files and create discussions. In our experience this leads to a good communication loop making sure you get what you want.

An example of when this makes a huge difference is at the start of a project, the specification stage. As the project develops your ideas, and things become more tangible its only natural that you may come up with changes. Rather than being inflexible, or charging more, we anticipate and thrive on this change! That is what Agile Project Management is about.

Where do we use Agile Project Management?

We use aspects of Agile Project Management in all areas of our business, but where it comes to the fore is larger projects. This is typically in custom programming or website development side of things. We do also use a simplified version on smaller projects such as Site Optimisation, or Server Security, but each step is condensed.

I will continue to write about how we manage our projects because it is key to a satisfied customer, but the most important thing to know is that it works! Just ask our customers!