Project management and Agile methods’ alignment in Agile’s “Fourth Age”
Pardeep (aka Paddy) Dhanda – Product Discovery, Design & Agile Practice Director at QA and co-author of the company’s The State of Learning in Agile Report 2023 – has been involved with Agile ways of working for the past 20 years; beginning only three years after the launch of the Agile Manifesto.
Since that time – which Paddy calls the “First Age of Agile” – organizations and practitioners have entered the “Fourth Age of Agile”, defined by what QA’s report terms as a “shift away from traditional project-based approaches towards product-centric thinking” and the coming of AI.
But what does this mean in practice for delivering new products, services and organizational change in 2025? Paddy shared his latest thinking with PeopleCert.
What started life as a way to improve software practices is now a business-wide methodology: Agile working is evident in 71% of Fortune 500 companies and now used across marketing, sales, HR and finance among others*.
But does this mean that project management is dead? For some, Agile is almost a religion and there can be a fixation on belonging to a particular “tribe”. On social media, we frequently see framework wars where supporters of one will condemn another. However, the idea that there’s no role for project management in an Agile environment is a myth.
In fact, the growth of Agile working has sparked even more demand for project management skills.
When moving to a product-centric model, project management capability is needed to succeed. Take the role of the product manager and the need they have for planning their roadmaps while negotiating with and managing stakeholders. I feel that Agile frameworks require even more planning than traditional projects since we have multiple planning horizons: we start with a product vision which spans multiple years, while roadmaps provide a long-term plan (typically 12 months), releases are mid-term plans covering two to three months, iterations are short-term plans spanning two weeks and practitioners are planning every day through their Daily Scrums. The key is to be adaptive and be prepared to replan as we increase the level of certainty in our plans.
While the growing presence of Agile delivery methods means today’s professionals are adopting a different style of project management, the work is still about building and delivering things, so the language of the project management world remains relevant.
So, rather than being tribal and favouring one approach over another, it’s about combining the capabilities and skills needed across diverse roles and activities.
And, according to QA’s State of Learning in Agile Report 2023, the greatest demand for those competencies comes from the middle management level. I like to refer to them as the lettuce in the burger.
For example, the project and product managers responsible for making things happen are feeling the squeeze between senior leadership (top of the burger) and teams on the ground (bottom layer of the burger), each wanting to see their organization adopt Agile approaches. And this is driving the demand for training and learning.
Make Agile work at scale
Where Agile techniques once resided with technology teams alone, the trend identified in our report showed Agile scaling beyond one to two teams and the greatest increase in demand for Agile education coming from industries such as transport, manufacturing and construction and banking and finance.
However, there are organizations in regulated sectors that are nervous about the prospect of going “full Agile”, seeing it as the “Wild West” and even guilty of some poor practices.
Institutions like banks – facing audits and regulations – want and need governance and safeguards for change and product/service delivery, with approaches that look beyond the two-week window typical of an Agile sprint.
This means turning to methods like PRINCE2 Agile Project Management and SAFe to provide additional structure and governance to Agile delivery environments.
But what was also suggested by the 17th Annual State of Agile report this year was a move by organizations to create hybrid approaches when scaling enterprise-wide change in an Agile environment, picking and choosing from different methods to achieve the best results
Agile adoption – the “strawberry jam test”
Agile adoption is difficult and the biggest obstacles are company culture, inconsistent practices and lack of experience with methodologies.
First, culture is the most challenging factor for any kind of change. That said, Agile thinking promotes values, principles and team behaviours that unlock sustainable performance and cross-functional working and a culture that promotes innovation and continuous learning.
In the same way that the best strawberry jam has lumpy bits in it, the most effective Agile adoption happens with champions scattered throughout the organization as advocates and role models.
So don’t fall into the trap ending up with raspberry jam, it’s just not as tasty. However, embedding Agile can still fail in traditional working environments where the culture is resistant to change. But changing the culture is difficult and therefore, it’s imperative that project managers don’t just manage deliverables but also promote the right team behaviours.
Lack of consistency can also derail effective Agile adoption: one organization, for example, spent two years collecting requirements (effectively, a linear/waterfall approach) for a major initiative but then tendered the project for providers to deliver it using Agile methods. To reap the rewards of agility, organisations must incorporate Agile thinking into their end-to-end delivery approach.
Finally, a lack of education and experience in Agile methods among managers is like giving someone a saw to carve a sculpture out of a log: they are going to be very dangerous and each decision they make could have damaging implications. Poor practices are both disruptive for teams and can sabotage transformation. This means that leaders should be at the very front of the training queue so that they know how they can better support their teams.
Whilst there is huge uncertainty about the future of AI, I’m optimistic that the 4th Age of Agile will create exciting opportunities for project managers to work in new and innovative ways. As organisations embark on their AI transformations and embrace hybrid approaches to scale Agile practices, project management provides the discipline, structure and governance needed to navigate complexity while maintaining flexibility.
