Agile Project Management

ThoughtWorks' Agile project management incorporates best practice from 14 years of experience in Agile and Lean methods. It is based around objective metrics, stakeholder involvement, feedback, and effective controls.

ThoughtWorks uses Agile principles to manage all of its projects. The foundation of the approach is feedback loops, giving timely information and effective controls on every aspect of the project.

User-Centered

In contrast to traditional approaches to project management, we do not wait until a testing "phase" to know whether our design works or whether the solution we built satisfies the requirements. We constantly seek feedback from stakeholders, often going directly to the end-users. We do this early and often which drives an incremental approach to delivery. The users have working software to interact with within weeks, and so we have effective feedback to learn from. We do not wait until the product is live to know whether people will want to use it or, if they do, whether it will be usable.

By working incrementally and putting testing at the center of all our processes, we find out at the earliest possible opportunity whether we are on-track for success.

Our project management metrics are based on software accepted by users. Feedback from users helps steer the project and plans are adapted to the latest objective information. This gives stakeholders high quality decision support data and the controls to execute those decisions to steer the project to success. No longer do decisions have to be made based on measures such as "nearly done" for 90% of the project.

Governance and controls

The processes that wrap the project are also constantly reviewed and optimized. Estimating and planning are honed iteration by iteration, with every member of the project and every stakeholder able to see at a glance the rate of progress. Status reporting, risk and issue management and governance issues are all constantly reviewed and refined to ensure they remain effective and reflect the latest information available. This constant review and improvement cycle allows us to operate in a wide variety of environments and to deal with change and evolution of projects and organizations effectively.

World leading in Agile

Martin Fowler, our Chief Scientist, was one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto and is a renowned author on the subject. He works with ThoughtWorkers around the world on Agile best practice and implementation.

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