What type of projects should use Agile Methodology?

Often, I encounter this question when I am taking a class on Agile / PMI-ACP^®. The question is:

"Nidhi, what projects are best suited to be implemented via Agile?"

Well, there has been a lot of talk around this for quite some time and many people have differing views. In this blog, I am sharing my view point and as always will try to explain based on my practical experience and a story.

Let's say, you have volunteered for a story telling session at the community centre. You are surrounded by the kids and you start a story. The story involves jungle animals. Suddenly you hear a sweet voice innocently asking you:

"If there were no unicorn in the jungle, what will happen?"

And now you notice many pair of eyes looking at you with anticipation. What will you do now? Yes, being a good samaritan, you will add unicorn to the story. So, what did you do? While telling the story, you learnt, that your customers (kids) want a unicorn, so you adapted to that and added that to your story. The kids were happy; you could see that in their eyes and smiles. Isn't that what you wanted? Give that smile to the kids….

That's how the projects following Agile mindset and methodologies work. They bring satisfaction to the customer. Customer gets what is valuable to him or her. And, this is adaptive lifecycle. Projects which have highly dynamic requirements, which have complexities that cannot be deciphered in the beginning of the project, which have several unknowns that can change the course of the project, things which have been undertaken first time by the team, customer needs to see things quickly and hence a quick turnaround is needed - these are some of the projects where an adaptive lifecycle works. That means that it may not be required for several other projects where you can plan in advance, where things are pretty clear. In such projects, you can follow a predictive lifecycle like Waterfall.

I hope you liked this blog and don't forget to watch my video on Agile mindset and the power of Agile mindset. Till next time, happy learning!