The Project Manager's Guide to Mastering Agile: Principles and Practices for an Adaptive Approach

16 Managed Agile Development Framework

THE MANAGED AGILE DEVELOPMENT Framework described in this chapter is a project-level framework that is intended to provide a balance of agility combined with some level of predictability and control. It is intended for companies that are unable or not ready to move to a more complete top-to-bottom agile model such as the Scaled Agile Framework. It is a hybrid software development lifecycle model consisting of a blend of an adaptive agile development approach based on Scrum at the micro-level and a more traditional plan-driven approach at the macro-level, as shown in Figure 16.1. It can be easily customized to fit a given project and business environment and can be adapted to companies that have more traditional business and project/portfolio management approaches at a higher level. It generally requires no significant transformation of those higher-level processes.

This approach was developed initially when I was managing a large government project. In order to meet government contractual requirements, we were required to commit to some plan-driven milestones at the program level, and we were required to report earned-value metrics to measure progress against those milestones. On first glance, it may sound impossible to make an agile approach work in that environment, but it worked quite well.

Naturally, there are trade-offs between the level of agility and flexibility to adapt to change at the micro-level and the level of predictability and ...