Are you a non-­technical person aiming for a project management career? I am sure that you have already started to make the first steps to see wether this area is the most suitable for you. You may have started your studies in the project management field or started to read other opinions on this topic and for sure it got into your attention a lot of new words or concepts that raised your curiosity. Many of them unfortunately are more related to technical projects and look difficult to understand.

The same thing happened to me as the first time I heard about AGILE was when a friend of mine gave me an advice about what project management courses I should follow. I asked his opinion on this as I was looking for some courses that could help me improve in my professional activity. He said to me to go for an Agile Methodologies course, as what I woud learn there can be easily adapted to my nontechnical projects.

So I wondered myself what is AGILE exactly? In project management it defines development methodologies that are normally used in technical companies in order for the project teams to develop software efficiently. It is a concept that is understood differently by different people. For instance managers see it as a set of methodologies that can improve business results; technical guys such as developers/programmers see it as just another management crazy idea. For a non-technical person, the detailed description of it could sound hard to understand, but the reality is that the principles behind AGILE actually can apply to any standard non­technical project and can definetly bring on to it a huge improvement.

Let’s think on a specific case study – like a project that implies to organize a career counseling program for students (I have chosen this study case due to my most recent project). The following points might look natural to be applied in this case – and they are all considered to be AGILE principles or methods. You will be amazed to see that AGILE is not something that complicated.

1. Setting the goals and constraints for the project and break the project into little parts

Let’s suppose in our case that the project manager aims to ensure through this program the organizing of a functional complex career counseling training program able to respond to the needs of up to 3000 students during a period of 5 months. In order for the program to actually be efficient, training activity sessions should be addressed to 10­ max 15 people, and this leads to ensuring the delivery of min. 10 training sessions/ week each addressing 15 people.

One of the Agile principles is that it is easier, more efficient and effective to break the project into small parts, or smaller projects. Let’s take in our example the creation of each training module within the counseling program, the individual organizing for each event(workshops, training sessions, courses, individual counseling sessions) that takes place within the program, or creation of the program schedule so that it maximize the results with the minimum of resources invested. This way the successful accomplishment of each small part of our big project ensures its’ general success.

2. Ensure cross functional and self­-organizing teams

In any project it is important to make sure that the team members have the ability and the necessary knowledge to complete or to replace each other if needed. Even though it is important to have specialists within the team and to ensure the right mix of people knowing how to do things, it is also important to support the knowledge transfer from one to each other. For instance, if something happens to a key member of the team (ex. he drops out or gets sick), the other team members should be able to fulfill that roll at least until a new person to do it is found. If the team is too large, it can be split to take care of different parts of the project, as this way a better collaboration and communication is ensured.

3. Having two set of eyes monitoring key activities

This principle should not be interpreted as ensuring allocating an extra resource to oversee every activity in the project, as we do not support creation of redundancies. In parallel to the development process, where programmers often work in pairs (Pair Programming), this measure actually helps the people in the team to learn from each other, work together and ensure two sets of eyes that would strengthen the results. In our case, having different specialists involved in the program structure or the creation of materials for each type of training course or counseling activity would definitely ensure a better training program for the participants.

4. Ensure team participation & communication

In order for the team to perform well it is important for each member to understand each part of the project. When the team members are involved in breaking the project activities into tasks, in estimating the resources needed (people, materials, time, etc), it is much easier for them to take responsibility for the task assigned to them. Having regular meetings with the team and even better a clear structure and schedule of these meetings can ensure the progress of the project in a very consistent manner.

AGILE proposes having daily ‘stand­up’ meetings – a concept that comes from the idea of having a meeting that is a long as people are willing to stand. These kinds of meetings are focused on shortly underlining what work was completed or not the day before and what are the problems that were faced, in order to help the team members find fast solutions and move on to the next tasks.

The advantage of these meetings is that they support having a permanent clear overview on the project, find solutions if needed or react fast in case there are priority changes to be done.

5. Engaging stakeholders in the process – especially the clients ­ and using their feedback

Likewise in Agile development processes, clients are essential for the project team. In our case the opinion of the audience – students and more specifically of the direct beneficiaries that participate to the program is essential for ensuring the best results of the project. They have to be considered as key partners and to be involved in the project as their feedback is essential. They know better what their needs are, they can communicate better the difficulties that they confront and they can set their expectations from this program. Having this information from them allows the project team to understand the dynamics of the groups and to adapt the project to offer solutions to their needs.

6. Adapting to changing requirements, to ensure the customer advantage

If based on the expectations and knowledge evaluation forms of a participating group to the training program we realize that they already know a part of the information that should be provided during the training courses, the best way to support them is to focus the training module on their needs. For the project team in this case adapting the training material for the specific group can become a priority change to be done, due to the specific needs that the students participating to the training program have.

Another example could be the fact that after 2 months, the project manager challenges the team with higher goals, like training 200 people/ week because it is a holiday period and students have more free time. This means that the team has to take into consideration of preparing a new schedule of activities or taking into consideration more resources. They have new constraints and the have to work closely. It might happen that they either would need more human resources to deliver the extra training modules, or rethink the current training modules format so that they can cover efficiently 20 people per group.

In the end, after reading all these, do you still think AGILE sounds that complicated? Changing the technical context transforms it actually in a very smart set of techniques that anybody could use in any type of project.

Author: DIANA GOSPODARU – MPE1, SNSPA