Project management (or PM) has been around for almost as long as projects have been around; in other words, since time immemorial. Of course, formalization of project management terminologies and techniques is not quite as dated and is also evolving as we speak. Project management has not achieved the same level of maturity and acceptance in all geographies and industries, neither is there one silver-bullet PM method that will work in all situations. The methods, principles and practices used to manage projects depend on various factors including the criticality, complexity, and length of the project, as well as team size and location, organizational culture, etc.
There is no PM practice that is universal. Besides, even for the same domains, practices evolve with time and also in response to unsuccessful attempts in the past. The Project Management Institute estimates that the world spends nearly one-fifth of its GDP (US $12 trillion in 2008) on projects. Given the huge amounts of funds involved, it is essential to gain better understanding of PM methods and be able to apply them in the best possible manner.
In this book, we make an attempt to introduce the readers to agile methods to managing projects. Agile methods have been around for a while now. However, they are gaining more and more acceptance as a result of the success trail that they leave behind in organizations that apply them, and also as organizations that have been burned by unsuccessful projects look for alternatives so that history does not repeat itself. Indeed, the yet to be released Standish Group report on software development chaos gives credit to agile methods for the stellar improvement in software development projects in the last decade. The new report states that 35% of software projects started in 2006 can be categorized as successful; a marked improvement from the groundbreaking report in 1994, which categorized only 16.2% projects as successful.
