MIS608 Agile Project Management Report 1 Sample

Task Summary

You are required to write an individual research report of 1500 words to demonstrate your understanding of the origins and foundations of Agile by addressing the following areas:

1. The origins of Agile – why did Agile emerge, what was it in response to, and how did this lead to the values and principles as outlined in the agile manifesto?

2. The origins of Lean and how it has influenced Agile practice

3. The similarities and differences between Scrum and Kanban as work methods

4. Why adopting Agile benefits an organisation

Please refer to the Task Instructions for details on how to complete this task.

Context

Organisations are increasingly using Agile as a project management approach to achieve their goals and objectives efficiently. While agile is predominantly used in software development, there are elements of agile that can be applied to achieving goals and objectives in many areas of an organisation. Understanding these concepts will be vital for you to progress in this subject. This knowledge will not only support your completion of the final group assignment, but also will assist you in managing your progress in the group project by using Agile techniques to communicat capacity and offer full transparency of work across the team.

Task Instructions

1. Write a 1500 words research report to demonstrate your understanding of the origins and foundations of Agile by addressing the following areas:

• The origins of Agile – why did Agile emerge, what was it in response to, and how did this lead to the values and principles as outlined in the agile manifesto?
• The origins of Lean and how it has influenced Agile practice.
• The similarities and differences between Scrum and Kanban as work methods.
• Why adopting Agile benefits an organisation.

2. Review your subject notes to establish the relevant area of investigation that applies to the case. Perform additional research in the area of investigation and select FIVE (5) additional sources which will add value to your report in the relevant area of investigation.

3. Plan how you will structure your ideas for the report. Write a report plan before you start writing. The report should be 1500 words. Therefore, it does not require an executive summary nor an abstract.

4. The report should consist of the following structure:

A title page with subject code and name, assignment title, student’s name, student number,
and lecturer’s name.

The introduction (100 – 150 words) that will also serve as your statement of purpose for the report—this means that you will tell the reader what you are going to cover in your report.

You will need to inform the reader of:

a. Your area of research and its context

b. The key concepts you will be addressing

c. What the reader can expect to find in the body of the report

The body of the report (1200-1300 words) will need to cover four specific areas:

a) Why did Agile originate? When did it emerge and what was it in response to? How did this lead to the four values and 12 principles that are outline by the agile manifesto?

b) Where did Lean originate? Briefly define what Lean is and two Lean philosophies have been adopted in the evolution of Agile practice?

c) Scrum and Kanban have many similarities, but also key differences. Compare and contrast Scrum and Kanban with each other, illustrating these similarities and differences with examples.

d) Explain what value adopting Agile can offer to an organisation.
The conclusion (100-150 words) will summarise any findings or recommendations that the report puts forward regarding the concepts covered in the report.

5. Format of the report

The report should use font Arial or Calibri 11 point, be line spaced at 1.5 for ease of reading, and have page numbers on the bottom of each page. If diagrams or tables are used, due attention should be given to pagination to avoid loss of meaning and continuity by unnecessarily splitting information over two pages. Diagrams must carry the appropriate captioning.

6. Referencing

There are requirements for referencing this report using APA referencing style. It is expected that you reference any lecture notes used and five additional sources in the relevant subject area based on readings and further research.

It is essential that you use the appropriate APA style for citing and referencing research.

Please see more information on referencing here:
https://library.torrens.edu.au/academicskills/apa/tool

7. You are strongly advised to read the rubric, which is an evaluation guide with criteria for grading the assignment—this will give you a clear picture of what a successful report looks like.

Solution

Introduction

Agile project management can be defined as an application of the principles for the Agile Software especially for the various management processes in managing the project (Torrance, 2019). Uni Assignment Help, Particular project management is facilitated by using the agile management application. The study highlights Agile's origination and Lean’s origination to focus on managing the projects. Similarities between kanban and scrum will be highlighted throughout the study. Most organisations use Agile project management for identifying the value and Achieving the goals. The main area of the study is to highlight the processes of project management and Knowledge area to identify the software development approach and to improve customer feedback in specific industries. The main concepts are different areas of agile project management and coordination to contrast with scrum and kanban methods.

Agile’s origination

Agile methodology has originated in the software development industry to manage software development projects. Many projects were taking so much time that the industry leaders realised the need for innovative and new approaches (Torrance, 2019). In 2001, Manifesto for Agile Software Development was signed and created from adaptive software development, extreme programming, scrum, feature driven development and others. The group of industry leaders had convened to find an alternative to the traditional project management method. The Agile Alliance was the creator of today's Agile methodology. Agile was used to manage the software development projects and it has evolved for handling different projects across the industries and markets. The main purpose of the methodology is to provide unpredictable and quick responses.

The four values by Agile Manifesto can be emerged to use as continuous process flow for the production. From Agile Manifesto, it is found that group is responsible for development of pressures that the change could be ensured to meet the certain development with heavy corporate power structure. It is rigorous to impose the emergency services for betterment of delivery software and effective approach for delivering (The Agile Manifesto, 2001). From the four values of agile, it is found that negotiations and customer collaboration are the main areas that are important to emerge. From the 12 principles and 4 values, Agile has been introduced to develop the projects with encouraging customer guidance and customer focus to be participated. The project management tool becomes powerful with communication and collaboration features for Agile project management. It can be noted that the principles can exclude the planning and valuable responses that agile is not only methodology but also a philosophy that the people can work indecently. It is originated to drive the thinking (Rigby, Sutherland & Takeuchi, 2016).

Lean’s origination

Lean’s origination involves luminaries such as Ohno, Ford, Taylor and others. The history of lean was started back in the 1450s. In Venice, Henry Ford introduced the concept of leaves in the system. In 1930, Toyota was inspired from Ford’s concept and invented the Toyota production system (“What is Lean | History and early development”, 2021). Frederick Taylor is the inventor of the lean project management method. With the dynamism of the manufacturing environment, a number of components of Lean manufacturing contributed to the field of lean management. Dr. Shigeo Shingo was an industrialist, an engineer and a consultant at Toyota. In 1960, he developed the SMED system to achieve zero quality defects.

The philosophy of lean management is:

? To define and map the value stream
? Creating flow to help eliminate the waste

Those Lean philosophies have evolved from the Agile principles. Specifically the blending philosophies of agile and lean have unique flow over the projects and the services. The lean delivery of projects was not mixed with other methodologies such as agile. Lean methodology is typical and powerful with no combinations of imagination. From the misconceptions, it has been built that lean management has been primarily involved to optimise the quality and value (Hensley, 2017). It involves “command and control”. The customers and companies refer to organisational problems to desiring “to be lean or to be agile”. it is likely to refer to software development. Lean and Agile have different similarities and blended philosophies. In order to deliver fast, the intention of lean and agile is to work on the software to launch into productions with all the stakeholders. Shared visual workspace can facilitate the decisions of short communication and high interaction. The Agile team can post the information to share and the Lean team can adapt. Implementation of lean production can be achieved for product line, value added processes and upstream activities. While the value can be defined, the lean philosophies are involved to eradicate the wastes (Flewelling, 2018).

Similarities and differences between Scrum and Kanban

Kanban focuses on reducing the time over the projects. They start to finish improving continuously with the flow of work. On the other hand, scrum commits to ship software through the intervals (Zayat & Senvar, 2020).

Similarities:

The similarities in kanban and scrum are:

? Kanban and Scrum are lean and agile.
? Both can limit the work in progress for project management.
? Both use transparency for driving the process improvement.
? The release plan is similar to optimise the empirical data based project.
? Additionally, both use transparency and pull scheduling.
? Scrum and kanban use breaking through processes into pieces (Zayat & Senvar, 2020).

Differences:

Components from her iterative work system depend on process flow and reduce the waste. The main differences can be identified for the project management:

 

Table 1: Differences between Scrum and Kanban
(Source: Zayat & Senvar, 2020)

From the above table, it is found that scrum promises for a more valuable increment of each sprint. Kanban helps to visualise the work with work-in-progress limitations. It can identify the continuous workflow structure to keep the teams ready and nimble. Several organisations use kanban methodology to repurchase materials to signal replenishment. Coloured bins can are the methods on the production of inventory stock by Kanban. On the other hand, scrum uses a common release for long-term practices (Zayat & Senvar, 2020). It is specific to approve the goals in the sprint review meeting. Scrum has defined the roles of product owner and scrum master and development team. For example, Scrum methodology is being used for Dutch Railway. Scrum has managed the projects in Netherlands and India or the 3 years.

Value Adopting Agile to an Organisation

Over the past decades, agile methodologies have been adopted by most of the organisations to streamline the voice that they develop and test the software. Adopting agile by the organisation can be challenging to enforce the structure for a new approach to process. Without the infrastructure, the organisations can use the legacy approaches that can require time and effort to speed up their Agile testing practices. Agile methodologies are considered as a gold standard to test the methodologies for continuous improvement and early delivery. Agile is considered to move towards the documentation process and organisations to figure out how the employees can work with it. There are several benefits to adopting agile such as great team engagement, more productivity, flexibility, improving quality and others. In addition, the project management industry is taking the next step for improving the services and customer satisfaction.

Several organisations identify the projects and efforts to complete and it involves other groups to complete the task (Gill, Henderson-Sellers & Niazi, 2018). For example, the software industry has taken this methodology to speed up the market. Examples of Jira can be drawn that it has moved to Agile because they can access better metrics. Different organisations streamlined greater transparency and communication to shift towards agile methodologies. It is achieving the testing automation and success policies during the process. Adopting the right tools for Agile is important to achieve the success and efficacy level to complete a certain task. It is to increase the transparency regarding the word cloth and complete the task within the deadlines.

Conclusion

The study can be concluded that agile methodologies and lean methodologies are the key areas that are defined with their similarities and differences. Agile methodology and lean methodology are being involved to focus on different organisational shifts. It can be recommended that agile methodology can be applied to achieve success and continuous improvement towards speed, efficiency and excellence. It is to empower the team to strive for great work and positive results. The agile team can turn to gain feedback in adopting Agile for the organisations. It is important to research different methodologies such as scrum, kanban and lean. The study has highlighted the importance of agile methodologies to assess how project management is being evaluated to taste the success criteria for the project management contexts.  

Reference list

Gill, A. Q., Henderson-Sellers, B., & Niazi, M. (2018). Scaling for agility: a reference model for hybrid traditional-agile software development methodologies. Information Systems Frontiers : A Journal of Research and Innovation, 20(2), 315–341. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-016-9672-8

Hensley, C. (2017). Lean misconceptions : why many lean initiatives fail and how you can avoid the mistakes. Taylor and Francis. https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=4941441.

Kamthan, P. (2021). Research anthology on recent trends, tools, and implications of computer programming. In On the nature of collaborations in agile software engineering course projects (pp. 1529–1551). essay, Engineering Science Reference. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-3016-0.ch068

Rigby, D.K., Sutherland, J.& Takeuchi, H. (2016, May). Embracing Agile. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2016/05/embracing-agile
The Agile Manifesto. (2001). The Agile Manifesto. Retrieved from https://agilemanifesto.org/

Torrance, M. (2019). Agile for instructional designers : iterative project management to achieve results. ATD Press. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=2294628.

What is Lean | History and early development. The Lean Way. (2021). Retrieved 16 June 2021, from https://theleanway.net/what-is-lean.

Zayat, W., & Senvar, O. (2020). Framework study for agile software development via scrum and kanban. International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management, 17(04). https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219877020300025

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