Agile Project Management Approach: The Aviation Industry - Research Paper Example

 Introduction A project is a short-term activity to reach some specific objectives. At the present, organizations perform business operations in the form of projects, which are managed through some proper mechanism known as project management. The project management is a set of different but interconnected tasks and is an important activity of more or less every organization in view of the fact that almost every organization at the present is concerned with some kind of project management. Project management is a methodical technique to managing and scheduling project resources and tasks from inauguration to completion. However, these tasks and resources are separated into five stages, i.e. initiation, planning, executing, controlling, and completion or termination of the project. In fact, this standard format of the project management can be used for almost every kind of project, in view of the fact that its basic purpose is to systematize the different processes of project development (Haughey, 2009; TechTarget, 2008; Kerzner, 2009). In agile project management, every iteration is an opportunity to go back over the plan and adjust to reality for the next iteration (Freedman, 2010). This paper presents a detailed analysis of agile project management approach. The basic purpose of this research is to discuss the agile project management with respect to aviation industry. Agile Project Management The traditional project management does not allow to change requirements during project development. On the other hand, project change is inevitable. Thus, to address this issue of traditional project management methodology, a new project management approach was introduced that is known as an agile method. This project management approach is straightforward and much faster than all other traditional project management methods. Actually, agile project management methodologies are composed of iterations. In fact, small teams work in partnership with project stakeholders to identify rapid prototypes, evidence of concepts, or a wide variety of aspects to identify the problem to be solved. In this scenario, the project team identifies the requirements for the iteration, creates the prototype, builds and executes appropriate test scripts, and the users authenticate the outcomes. In addition, verification takes place much earlier in the project development life cycle than it would with traditional project management methods, permitting stakeholders to modify requirements while they are still comparatively painless to change (Serena, 2007; Rehman, ullah, Rauf, & Shahid, 2010). In addition, agile project management methodologies adopt the iterative and incremental practice to enhance the output and effectiveness of the project development life cycle. Hence, the agile project management approach does not only keep away from requirement collection at the commencement of the project but also it makes possible the customer’s participation all the way through the development life cycle. In addition, the customer’s participation in the development of project activities helps the project team to create accurate and high quality product. Moreover, agile project management does not involve a lot of documentation for the reason that the team relies almost completely on informal internal communication. These methodologies offer the capability to implement the changes and continuously revise any other phase of the development process. Furthermore, the output of the agile project management appears in small incremental releases bearing in mind the changing requirements of the project. If a change has been made to the project requirements, is adjusted in the next iteration. The basic objective of agile project management is to please the customers by satisfying their requirements at any stage of the project development life cycle (Rehman, ullah, Rauf, & Shahid, 2010; Boehm & Turner, 2003). Basically, the agile project management methodologies such as SCRUM, Feature-Driven Development, eXtreme Programming (XP) intend to decrease the expenditure of changes all the way through the project development life cycle. For instance, eXtreme Programming is based on the quick iterative planning and development cycles with the intention of forcing trade-offs and delivering the maximum value characteristics as soon as possible. Additionally, XP encompasses an excellent feature known as “constant and systemic testing” to make certain high quality through early defect identification and resolution (CC Pace Systems, 2011). At the present, a large number of studies, researches and surveys are being carried out at each level in order to determine the positive and negative features of agile project management. In this scenario, the previous concepts of agile approaches, particularly, received lots of discouragement and criticism due to the absence of scientific proof, as well as their appropriateness and usefulness just for the management of those software development projects in which small-sized and co-located teams were attempting to develop non-safety critical software applications with always changing requirements (Salo, 2006, p. 24; Dyba & Dingsoyr, 2008). In view of the fact that since the beginning and the emergence of agile software methodology, both researchers and practitioners have paid a great deal of attention to agile approaches, as a result developing an increasing amount of experimental facts and data on the diverse features of agile software development methodologies. Despite the emergence of specific practices and methods of agile software development to deal with the specific context of software applications, a variety of challenging issues have emerged, for instance the applicability of agile methodologies for huge, critical and multisite projects as well as the compatibility of agile approaches with available standards. In the past few years, the researchers and practitioners have started to pay attention to business and organizational features of agility. In the same way, the previously developed agile techniques and approaches have been continuously improving and further evolving in order to integrate various useful features for instance, XP, Scrum, Test-Driven Development (TDD), Crystal and DSDM. In view of the fact that at the present there is as much as experimental proofs are available on the agile practices and techniques, hence the discussion in the favor of or against the use of agile methodologies is currently not absolutely about their advantages, however, it is about the need to grow their scope and implement them within industries in conjunction with predefined and established plan-driven processes requirements (Salo, 2006, p. 24; Dyba & Dingsoyr, 2008). The research has shown that one critical challenge in implementing agile methodologies within organizations can be occurred while balancing the presently controlling engineering practices and approaches of practicable, anticipated and repeatable practices along with agile software development approaches, which again combine process adaptation, self-organization and continuous changes. It is suggested that an organization must balance the two practices with the intention of attaining the benefits from their strengths requirements (Salo, 2006, p. 24; Dyba & Dingsoyr, 2008). In their article (Swabey, 2010) discuss the example of agile project management implementation for the aviation industry. According to (Swabey, 2010), the British Airline was suffering through critical information technology related challenges and revenue was falling badly. At that point, Mike Croucher (head of IT) decided to adopt agile project management approach in order to improve the IT culture of the industry. As one of the most important advantages of agile project management is that it provides an excellent support for change management throughout the project life cycle so they adopted this project management approach to support change in this sector. In addition, the decision to adopt agile project management approach proved to be a success (Swabey, 2010; Glaiel, 2012). Without a doubt, at the present agile project management is being used in the majority of projects all through the world. However, it is believed that agile project management is suitable for the management of small projects. In fact, it should not be used when an organization wants to implement critical functions such as in aviation industry where the development and implementation of a system should be carefully monitored. In a research paper, (Glas & Ziemer, 2009) discuss a wide variety of challenges and issues that projects can face while using agile project management approaches for the management of aviation related projects. According to (Glas & Ziemer, 2009) aviation industry heavily depends on effective customer support and relationships and they always need to implement systems by making use of modern and ground-breaking aircraft concepts and ideas. On the other hand, the development of new aircrafts and associated applications involve a wide variety of risks as well as a very complicated task. In this scenario, experts from aviation industry always try to deal with these risks and complication by making use of an incremental process model. The research has shown that the adoption of new methods such as agile project management can help aircraft manufacturers minimize the risks and complexity associated with aircraft development as well as it can provide an excellent support for the development of revolutionary aircraft. In this scenario, the adoption of agile project management approach can play a significant role in dealing with risks associated with products of aviation industry (Glas & Ziemer, 2009). As discussed above, agile project management was developed in order to address the issues of traditional project management approaches. It encompasses a wide variety of principles, which can be applied to a variety of industries especially the aviation industry. Up till now, there has not been considerable developments in adoption of agile project management approaches for aviation industry. However, a large number of researches and experiments are being conducted to determine the advantages offered by the agile project management for aviation industry. In addition, it is believed that the adoption of agile project management can play significant role in the development and growth of aviation industry. References Boehm, B., & Turner, R. (2003). Observations on Balancing Discipline and Agility. Retrieved April 06, 2014, from http://agile2003.agilealliance.org/files/P4Paper.pdf CC Pace Systems. (2011). Agile Project Management. Retrieved April 04, 2014, from www.ccpace.com/Resources/documents/AgileProjectManagement.pdf Dyba, T., & Dingsoyr, T. (2008). Empirical studies of agile software development: A systematic review. Information and Software Technology, Volume 50 Issue 9, 833-859. Freedman, R. (2010). Comparing traditional and agile project management estimation techniques. Retrieved April 08, 2014, from http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-manager/comparing-traditional-and-agile-project-management-estimation-techniques/4357 Glaiel, F. (2012). Agile Project Dynamics: A Strategic Project Management Approach to the Study of Large-Scale Software Development Using System Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: Composite Information Systems Laboratory (CISL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Glas, M., & Ziemer, S. (2009). Challenges for agile development of large systems in the aviation industry. OOPSLA '09 Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN conference companion on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications (pp. 901-908). New York, NY, USA: ACM. Haughey, D. (2009). The Role of the Project Manager. Retrieved April 03, 2014, from http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/the-role-of-the-project-manager.html Kerzner, H. R. (2009). Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling. New York: Wiley. Rehman, I. 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