In this competency, you have learned about two project management strategies:
Agile and Waterfall. You have identified the keys terms, roles, and components that
define each strategy and learned about both strategies strengths and weaknesses.
FInally, you have considered different project contexts and determined which
project management strategy would be best and why.
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Competency Set: Project Management
Because of the difference in approaches between traditional and agile project management, it is important to understand the key terms and tools that come up within each project approach. Below is a list of key terms with definitions. You are encouraged to review these terms and others via the texts listed in the curated content.
Waterfall (Traditional) Project Management
Project Definition or Scope Document: This document lays out the definition of the project, its goals stakeholders, and possible risks and constraints.
Stakeholders: Every person or organization involved in the project and their roles. This includes the project team, customers, and anyone else involved in the project.
Project Plan: A complete set of procedures and plans for managing a project. This includes task schedules, timelines, budget, risk, and communication plans, and any other elements that the project manager or organization needs to manage and complete the project successfully.
Work Breakdown Structure (WBS): A hierarchical list of all the project tasks and milestones required to completed in order for the project to finish successfully.
Project Schedule: Developed from the WBS, the project schedule places the tasks of the WBS into a timeline and adds dependencies between tasks where necessary.
Milestone: Important points of progress within a progress plan that usually indicate a shift in work and resources within the project.
Agile Project Management
Because Agile doesn’t have one set of tools or structures, we will instead look at 3 different approaches and styles for Agile project management and definitions within each.
Scrum: An agile practice relying on teams with a minimal hierarchy (Product Owner, Scrum Master, team member). In Scrum, project deliverables are planned and created during project sprints in which team members focus on building specific features of a deliverable.
Extreme Programming (XP): An agile approach to software development that relies on iterative and collaborative work between developers. XP focus on testdriven coding in which developers first create tests that their software must pass before it can be included in the product, and pair-programming in which developer work in closely knit two-person teams that actively build a single set of code together.
User Story: A practice used in Scrum and XP in which project deliverable requirements are defined by describing how the customer or user will interact with and use the project deliverable.
Story Points: Difficulty levels applied to different components of a user story that indicate the amount of effort each aspect of a particular user story will take to create.
Sprint: Uniformly timed sets of project work (usually 1 month long) during which members of the Scrum team develop one aspect of the project deliverable.
Kanban: A method for process improvement that relies on three foundational principles focused on steady and slow change from a workable start.
Principles of Kanban:
1. Start with what you do now.
2. Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change.
3. Respect current roles, responsibilities, and job titles.
(Stellman and Greene 315)