IT managers are playing a bigger role than ever before in how a business is run and its ultimate success. One of the questions many IT managers have found themselves asking is whether they want to be a part of a business that focuses on agile product development or one that favours a traditional project management plan.
Traditional project management is how most businesses handled product development and line improvement. The traditional style involves putting together a long, detailed timeline for each project and getting every single aspect of the product perfect before the official product launch.
Agile product development is the opposite end of the spectrum. When a business decides to use agile development to create a new product, they create multiple cross-functional product squads who each work on a specific aspect of the product. Key components of agile product development include:
While the concept of agile product development has been around for a long time, it didn't become a popular business tool until the turn of the century.
Traditional project management is the process most companies use when they decide it's time to develop a new product. The process follows a well-established process that goes from idea, to developing a prototype, to conducting consumer tests, to debugging the product, to releasing a fully developed product on the market. Businesses that use a traditional project management system never deviate from the formula. The tight timeline also makes it difficult to innovate the product mid-development to accommodate an unanticipated need.
History shows that the traditional model of project management was developed in the 1970s. Businesses quickly fell in love with it. The way the system works is:
Once the design has launched, the business rarely does anything to upgrade or improve the product.
The rigid and lengthy timeline traditional project management results in many promising products being discarded because they're taking way to long to develop.
Many believe that agile product development predates traditional project management by several centuries. They argue that if Sir Francis Bacon laid the groundwork for agile product development back in the 1620s when he created his scientific formula. While there are examples of agile development scattered throughout history, the Agile Manifesto wasn't created until 2001. Many businesses, including Toyota and PayPal, have adopted an agile product development strategy and have been very happy with the results.
Businesses that favour agile product development divide their talent into product project squads and break the total project into chunks. Each of the teams works in quick sprints to swiftly handle whichever part of the development process they've been assigned. Using this system, it doesn't take long for the product to launch. After the launch, data and customer feedback is collected. Once the teams have enough customer feedback, they tweak the product, making it extremely user-friendly.
While there are always going to be risks connected to product development, agile product development goes a long way towards mitigating those risks. A good agile product development system not only drastically shortens the amount of time it takes to launch the product, but since customer feedback leads to constantly improving the product so that it's perfectly suited for your target market's needs and desires. The result is a high degree of customer satisfaction, which in turn leads to customer loyalty.
Benefits of agile product development include:
When it comes to software and app development, the biggest benefit of traditional project management is that the product is more polished on the launch date than products developed via an agile process. There aren't any plans to tweak the product to make it more appealing to customers, or more efficient.
Stakeholders like traditional project management. They appreciate getting a piece of paper that has the projected timeline, cost control measures, and assures them that once the product is released, it won't ever need to be changed.
Additional advantages connected to traditional product management include:
While there are some industries that should focus on traditional project management, others, including software and app development businesses, should seriously consider converting to agile product development. Most businesses report that when they switched to agile product development, they developed products 37% faster than they had before and noticed a 16% increase in productivity. The same companies also reported a significant increase in annual revenue.
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