Using agile project management to maximize your and your coauthors' productivity

Abstract

For decades as information technology (IT) projects grew bigger and more complex, project failures seemed to become increasingly common, in spite of intense efforts to apply traditional project planning. Those traditional planning tools focused on balancing the triple constraints of cost, schedule, and scope to create a plan. Then those tools unsuccessfully focused on delivering the planned scope within the planned cost and schedule. In 2001 the "agile project manifesto" pointed the way to better manage projects having a flexible scope in an uncertain environment. Since then agile project management in IT has matured and proven itself for large and small IT projects. Academic work has features that parallel the reasons agile project management is needed for IT. It often has (1) an undefined scope, (2) unknown and possibly unmeasurable task times, (3) an unidentified assortment of tasks featuring undiscovered task dependencies, and (4) an ever-changing resource availability for each project due to the impacts of other projects on resource needs. These factors acting in combination create a "perfect storm" that destroys the ability to use traditional project planning. A simplified form of agile project management can be built around the flexible management of scope, prioritization of projects and tasks, and creation/management of deadlines that depict much of academic work. This paper details lessons that have been learned, supporting immediate application of this approach.