PMI’s A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) Sixth Edition recognizes the importance of agile-based approaches in project management and PMI’s Agile Practice Guide stresses on a practical approach to agile practices.

In many contexts, project managers need to mix agile-based approaches with a plan-driven approach for better results. The pragmatic approach to agile practices focuses on its practical implementation in the context of a team. Most teams take agile as an undocumented methodology that lacks accountability in practice, while in reality documentation is equally important and accountability needs to be fixed within the team. Such understanding is especially useful for project managers who have so far worked on waterfall models.

In workshops in Bengaluru and Kolkata on 1 October and 4 November, respectively, PMI volunteer Saket Bansal, who is a director at iZenBridge Consultancy, explored ways to make the best use of agile approaches in project management. The sessions included ways to select the development lifecycle, when to use agile-based approaches or a mix of agile and plan-driven approaches, basics about Scrum and Kanban, the scaled agile framework, and disciplined agile.