What Is Agile?

First of all, "Agile" is just a word that expresses a certain agility. In project management, agile is often confused with a defined method. Because Agile is not Scrum, but Scrum is agile at best.

If you want to get closer to agile project management, the first look should go to the agile manifesto; because here the most important values and thoughts behind Agile are described:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

From this manifesto agile principles can be derived, which accompany not only the project manager, but the entire team.

Agile attitude

This results in a personal attitude (new German: agile mindset), which in the best case is adopted or at least supported by the entire team and defines how a team organizes itself and carries out the projects.

However, this is still not a method, because especially in agile there are a lot of possibilities.

Agile methods

In this context we leave the field of project management to give the agile space. Even methods commonly known as agile, such as Scrum, are often only a framework of possibilities from which the team can and should make use. Ken Schawaber has also planned it for Scrum.

Other methods for an agile approach could be the following:

• pair programming
• Test-driven development
• constant refactorings
• Story Cards
• quick code reviews

It is important to reiterate that it does not only apply to project management, but can be applied to many areas of daily life and work.

Hybrid project management

In recent years, a mixture of agile and traditional project management has begun to establish itself. So-called hybrid project management is now considered the third way between traditional and agile. The motivation for this is usually to use the best of both worlds and to develop an optimal process model under given conditions.