Agile Program Management

Today’s businesses operate with increased levels of complexity that often involve cross-functional teams, each with their own mix of budgets, resources, and work priorities. In parallel, this ongoing delivery often relies on collaborative work that intermingles traditional definitions of projects and siloed team operations.

Agile programs and associated activities like Program Increment (PI) planning were initially popularized by the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and are commonly leveraged for software development, but they can be adopted by any persistent cross-functional teams that need to collaborate regularly to deliver business value. They offer an ideal framework for collaboration and delivery that spans traditional project and operating models in a way that more accurately reflects today’s business practices.

As Agile programs are more broadly adopted by business teams and incorporated throughout an organization’s strategic portfolio, they allow an enterprise to achieve new levels of agility, delivering increased value reliably and more often, while optimizing resources and minimizing risks.

Agile Programs vs Waterfall Projects

Traditional business projects are planned and executed leveraging tightly scoped budgets, resources, and cross-functional project teams that are bound to, and continue to exist, only as long as the project itself. Project management methodologies allow for scope changes, but only within certain boundaries, since exceeding those boundaries will mean defining a new project (and associated scope) while also closing down the previous project mid-flight.

Agile programs and program teams, on the other hand, regularly collaborate to deliver value across multiple quarters and years. Their costs, capacity, and resources are reflected in value streams, and their work is planned incrementally, allowing them to quickly adjust to changes, even significant ones.