Is It Time to Move Beyond Traditional Project Management?

The processes and principles of project management plays a major role in completing the project within a specified time and budget, resulting in expected goal achievement and better revenue generation. It is a common myth that project management slows down the processes and leaves no room for innovation as you need to stick to a single plan. Instead, to set your team for success, it is critical to bring agility, and to master the modern way of delivering projects. Using the best project management tool helps project managers overcome all the challenges relating to project management and oversee projects from conception to completion.
The traditional approach towards project management is no more beneficial in the current situation, where you see uncertainty. After the Covid-19 outbreak, many companies using traditional project management have struggled to complete their projects on time as per the plan because of lockdown mandates and work-from-home situations. Therefore, modern businesses are embracing one of the most flexible and practical approaches to managing projects – Agile Project Management. Before we look into why we prefer agile over traditional project management, let’s go through a basic overview of these methodologies. 

What is Traditional Project Management?

Traditional project management, also known as the waterfall approach, is a concept that follows a sequence of phases, including flexibility check, tasks assessment, resource planning, development, testing, and support. Each step follows another stage in a sequence. You cannot jump to the next phase without completing the previous phase. Thus, the traditional project management is not flexible enough to suit large projects as it has no scope of changing the requirements after the project development phase has started. 

What is Agile Project Management?

Agile project management follows an iterative process in which the project requirements, budget, and resources planning can be changed at any time to complete the project beneficially. On the contrary to traditional project management, agile is considered to be much more flexible as it focuses on teamwork, customer satisfaction, and collaboration.

Why Is Agile Project Management Preferred Over Traditional Project Management?

There are various reasons due to which project managers prefer agile over traditional project management. Let’s go through some of the most critical ones
Scope of Changes

When it comes to the traditional approach, the project budget and delivery time are fixed before the project is initiated. So, the chances of making changes in the middle of the project management become difficult or even impossible. Agile project management allows changes at any level of project management. It makes it easy for the project managers to tweak the process or create any kind of changes while the project is in its building phase

Adaptability to Unexpected Situations
During the Covid-19 outbreak, many unexpected instances were happening relating to shipping, supply, labor, etc. In that situation, if your project plan cannot adapt to the sudden changes, it cannot yield expected results on completion. Agile project management allows adaptability to unexpected situations and enables project managers to execute substitute plans immediately to keep the project running smoothly. At the same time, traditional project management cannot facilitate this kind of adaptability. 
Project Complexity

As traditional project management follows a linear approach, complexities in the project can block the entire process. Agile project management is best suited for large and complex projects as those kinds of projects have many variables connected. At the same time, the traditional approach is meant for the single-phase connected kind of projects that are not complex in nature. 

Client Involvement

The traditional approach allows client involvement only at the starting phase of the project. So, until the project ends, there are many unnecessary expenditures and mistakes that the client may not approve of. The agile process keeps the client in the loop at every project lifecycle stage and eliminates situations that clients disagree about and create discrepancies. 

How Do You Choose The Right Project Management Methodology?

Choosing the correct project management methodology is essential as it can help the entire organization achieve the intended goals for that particular project. It becomes easy for the project manager and the entire team working on the project to follow the right path, get the best out of each resource, and stay within the budget. Certain factors can impact choosing the suitable project methodology like cost & budget, team size, ability to take risks, flexibility required, timeline, client and stakeholder involvement.  

There is no perfect methodology for a particular project. You need to often apply two or more project methodologies to accomplish success and achieve predetermined goals. Using a single traditional project management methodology might not suit the current situation and growing competition these days. Thus, the time is now to move on with the progressive project management methodology like agile and win the race.

Besides that, choosing the right project management tool that supports multiple project management methodologies is also critical. A collaborative, supportive, and user-friendly project planning software would support you throughout the project lifecycle, save your time and costs, and help you make better and informed decisions.