Applications to Other Enterprise and IT Projects
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>> Hello and welcome to lesson 6.2,
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the applications of Agile
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to other enterprise IT projects.
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I'm your instructor Kane,
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and we are in Module 6, the conclusion.
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One of the things that gets talked about a lot,
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and I'm personally guilty of this as well,
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is the idea of chronological snobbery.
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For those of you that
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didn't take my enterprise project management course,
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chronological snobbery is this idea that
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the things that are new are
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inherently better than the things that are old.
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We tend to be hyper-focused on the newness of
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certain ideas to the exclusion of
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the timeless wisdom that the ideas actually came from.
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You hear a lot about Agile being a fad,
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and what that means is
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that it's hip and people talk about it
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and we want to really focus on Agile
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today because it's the new thing
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and it'll be gone tomorrow.
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Although not many traditional project managers,
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think that Agile is a fad
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and it'll go away and it'll
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get replaced to something else.
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Gain, I'm guilty of this in the sense
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that when people bring up Agile to me,
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I think back to my heyday,
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if you will, of rapid application development.
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I'm like, "Well, you know what,
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what's old is new again,
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we're rehashing the same things that we
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talked about in the 1990s."
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Other than demonstrating my age, that is true.
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But we have to remember that as project managers,
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our product is cognitive,
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meaning it's in your brain housing group
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to use an old military slang term.
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What we produce as
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project managers is not a consumable item.
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We are skilled at developing
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the appropriate cognitive framework that allows for
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a somewhat scientific way
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of determining how we can accomplish
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the most amount of work in the least amount of time or
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bring more value to
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the organization than if they had not hired us.
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If we're trying to draw
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paychecks that are commensurate with what we're
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doing and we're not actually producing an item
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like a cup or a phone or whatever,
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then we have to justify
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our existence based on our ability to develop
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a cognitive framework that is
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effective for the organization that
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allows for the production
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of the most amount of value in the least amount of time.
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In that sense, Agile is not a fad.
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Certain Agile methodologies probably are a fad,
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meaning everybody under the sun can
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come up with some cool hip new way
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of talking about performing work.
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They're way better than these other ways,
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Scrum better than Kanban, yada, yada, yada.
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That's faddish in the sense
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that techniques always evolve.
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There's no defined technique for how to perform work.
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But the idea behind the cognitive framework,
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the idea behind producing value for the organization,
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that strategy execution piece
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is so important because it's hard,
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it's really hard to do.
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If it was easy, everybody would do
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it and companies would be wildly successful.
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But that's not the case.
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Like I said before in one of my previous videos,
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half of all projects fail.
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The bigger and the more complicated the project,
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the more likely it is to fail.
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There are very, very skilled project managers.
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More skilled than I am and
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I know I've had to put my ego in the backseat there.
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But there are some really skilled project
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manager's strategy execution experts
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that are very,
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very good at transitioning a vision,
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a strategy goal into
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a functional product that can be used.
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That's what I mean by Agile is not a fad.
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How we do that is not going to go away.
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There's no one way of performing work that is
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scientifically so much better than
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any other way of performing
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work that we get rid of the other way.
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What Agile does and does very,
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very well the hyper focuses on
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the idea of bringing value to
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the organization as quickly as possible.
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Again, we talked about this in previous videos.
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Can I build a house with Agile principles?
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I can, probably wouldn't be ideal.
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But there is a home for
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Agile primarily within information technology projects,
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as well as we've talked about in
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the previous video, cybersecurity projects.
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It exists, it's real.
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But the methodology and
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the techniques are going to
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constantly change as technology changes.
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You don't want to marry yourself to
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an Agile methodology and think that Scrum is
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the end-all be-all or Kanban is the end-all
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be-all or DSDM is the end-all be-all or whatever.
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The point of Agile,
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ironically enough, is to be Agile.
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The overriding principle of Agile is how do I
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bring value to the organization
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in the shortest amount of time?
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It's not that much different than traditional waterfall,
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which is how do I bring in a new piece of work on time,
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on budget and meet
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all constraints, performance criteria.
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It's just a different cognitive framework.
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We have now two competing cognitive frameworks
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for how we perform work.
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Will there ever be a third,
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or a fourth, or a fifth?
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Those are good questions and I don't
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really know the answer to them.
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But in this space called project management,
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that is the value
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that you as a project manager bring to the organization.
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Are you positioned well
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to bring value to the organization?
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It is the way that you structure
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work better than somebody else.
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That's really where the Agile waterfall thing comes from.
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So no, I don't think Agile is a fad.
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I think it'll be around for quite a long time.
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I think waterfall will be around for a long time.
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It's been around since the 1960s.
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I don't think it's going anywhere.
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In today's video, we discussed
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whether or not Agile was a fad.
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I talked a lot about the cognitive framework
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of Agile or product management in general.
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I think it's important to focus on
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the fact that there's this thing called strategy.
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What are the goals, what are the ends versus the means?
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Then there's this thing called strategy execution,
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which is a group of people dedicated,
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skilled, and able to execute those strategy objectives.
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Thank you very much, have a great day and I'll see you in
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our final video of the conclusion.
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