Project management in agile and plan-based companies

Surveys of more than 8,000 projects show that most project failures involve stakeholder problems. Notably, five of the top six reasons for failure stem from communication problems between the development team and the customer. In 2000, the Standish Group identified 10 factors for project success. Of these, the second and third most important were “user involvement” and an “experienced project manager.” From this you can conclude that most projects fail because of people and project management issues rather than technical issues. Agile methods are a recent set of development techniques that apply a human-centered approach to software production. The agile approach aims to deliver high-quality products faster, producing satisfied customers. We conducted an empirical study to investigate whether agile methods change and improve project management practices in software companies. We based the study on Henry Petroski’s approach, which says that the “analysis of causes of failures can do more to advance knowledge than all the successes in the world.” The underlying data sample comprises managers of software companies— 10 adopting agile methods and 10 using traditional (which, for simplicity, we call planbased) approaches.