Agile vs Traditional Project Management: My 5 takeaways

1. As project members, we solve problems that are imperfectly understood, and we often generate unique and unrepeatable results in terms of the solutions that we come up with to solve those problems.
2. Traditional waterfall approach started from the assumption that we have to know the answer before we can plan. It requires that every piece of our project to be completely understood, ultimately limiting the output in terms of scale and complexity .
3. Agile approach, however, is based on a series of experiments, empirical results that allow us to frequently test our ideas and importantly, reject the bad ones.
4. Agile is a philosophy of learning and discovery, frequent reviews and appropriate adjustments. This is really the same idea that started science off a few 100 years ago.
5. I’m a longtime supporter of agile thinking, which is not about stand ups or Kanban or continuous integration and test driven development. These are the tools that should only help us in our quest to project delivery. The main key is to review and adapt frequently, this is the only way to remain agile.

I am extremely glad to finally work in Tech industry that accepted this philosophy as a norm and as not just a buzz term, at the end of the day, this caught my interest at my Masters research back in 2011.