Reflection on “Agility Ability by Gale, October 2012”
The article “Agility Ability” discusses the importance of the quick responses and the fast implementation in projects management in case of unexpected events happened through the project lifetime. Of course that is not an easy task in the uncertain business world that we have these days, in addition to the projects complex nature, all that makes the project manager job even harder. The term Agility stands simply for identifying risks sooner, adapting to change quickly and delivering value, and that means projects should have more collaborative / robust risk management. Additionally, the project manager should insure that all team members work together, and avoid work in isolation.
In case of the changing market conditions, having a solid change management can be very crucial when it comes to a faster adaptation. Change management works side by side to risk management, considering these two to be the firm’s defense lines; early / consistent risk management makes organizations more flexible and enables them to manage obstacles more fluidly. However, that is not an easy job, and it may include several training sessions for the staff, knowing that the sooner issues can be solved, the more agile a firm becomes.
The article suggest that by breaking any project into bite-sized, value driven pieces, risks can be dramatically lowered; when the project is divided into smaller pieces and delivered more frequently with a regular stream of feedback, not only can project manager get immediate value from those deliverables, they can get better control on what happens later on.
Some of the lessons learned from this article are that to achieve this change on an organizational level, you have to win the support from the top management. In addition to that, it is recommended that the project managers find a way to build analytical tools to be early predictor of failure, because when we know something is going to happen, we can plan for it; however, surprises take a lot longer to deal with.
This article discussed some aspects of change management; personally, I completely agree with the idea that it is almost impossible to achieve change without the support of the top management, but I feel like support and commitment is two different things, and from my own experience, the real challenge is getting the top management commitment to the change. My construction company used to support the idea of change, and they used to start working on it when there is no new projects coming in, but what happened when the new project came along, the top management lost focus, and started working on the hot topic of that day, which was the new project. Now my company supported change, but was not committed to it, and that is why they lost focus when the new project came in, leaving the change hanging, without getting anywhere and that wasted a lot of the company’s resources more than once.
