PROJECT MANAGEMENT

What is Agile Project Management? How do I Make My Non-Profit Agile? — Part 1

Agile Project Management ensures superior projects, highly satisfied customers, reduced risks, increased flexibility, and improved team morale; yet, not a lot of non-profits benefit from Agile Project Management. Learn how you can bring Agile to your non-profit using SCRUM and KANBAN!

This is the first part of the two-part series of bringing agile to the non-profit world. In this article, I discuss agile, agile manifesto, and agile principles, and end it with seven tips on how to create a culture in which agile project management thrives. The second part of the series will focus on the more practical aspects such as setting up agile project management using SCRUM and tools one can use to do so.

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

Miryam was confident that the project her team was going to deliver to the funder will be accepted with open arms; consequently, she will receive a promotion and pave her way to the upper echelons of her organization. She had all her justifications about the delays in the deliverables, and how they resulted in cost escalations that were approved by the funder. All the communication materials had been prepared. The final presentation was about to start. She presented her findings and showed the tool for forty minutes. Unfortunately, the expressions on the face of the audience sent shivers down her spine. Her deepest fear came true when the funder told the organization that it was the last project they were doing with her organization. Miryam was devastated.

Not every situation is as dramatic as the one just described above, but you all must have been part of a project that was unable to deliver on what it promised, took more time and money than was decided upon, and dealt with furious funders and beneficiaries because of scope alterations and requirements modifications. The current favorite framework in the non-profit world is called Waterfall Approach, which has been shown to result in the issues that I discussed above. The question that comes up subsequently is what the solution is for solving this challenge. You may have read on the internet that agile can be a solution, but you have no **** idea of what agile is. This article is for you. You’re an innovator who wants to make your organization better and deliver excellent projects and want to learn about agile. Let’s get started!

What is Agile; what is Agile Project Management?

According to Oxford Languages, the word agile means “able to move quickly, easily, and flexibly”. This is also the main crux of agile project management, that is to say, an ability of a business to move quickly in an easy and flexible manner by keeping the needs of its customers in mind. During the whole project cycle, customer involvement is encouraged, providing visibility & transparency, and showing the actual progress of projects. Agile methodology focuses on delivering the features that have the greatest value first. Given tighter budgets and faster turnaround times, agile is the new way of doing project management in a variety of industries. It consists of different methodologies — SCRUM and KANBAN are two of them — and all of them are based on the concepts of flexibility, transparency, quality, and continuous improvement.

Benefits of Agile

There are various benefits of agile that the industry has been appreciating for quite some time now. Some of them include higher product quality, higher customer satisfaction, increased project control, improved task prioritization, reduced risks, increased project predictability, and better metrics among others.

Agile Manifesto and Agile Principles

Agile Manifesto was first written in 2001 and it is true even in 2022. It wouldn’t be wrong to speculate that the manifesto will stand true to eternity. What is it that makes it so evergreen? The answer lies in its simplicity. There are four values written in the agile manifesto, and I am modifying them to suit the needs of the non-profits better. You can find the original manifesto here.

1. Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools
2. Working Program over Comprehensive Documentation
3. Beneficiaries' Collaboration over Contract Negotiation
4. Responding to Change over Following a Plan

Many starters think that agile is focused only on the values written on the left; however, what the manifesto says is that the values written on the right are also very important, but one should focus more on the values written on the left. The best teams are those that prioritize the values on the left while being mindful of the values on the right too.

There are twelve principles of Agile.

1. Customer Satisfaction — listen frequently to your customers/beneficiaries in order to provide them with what they desire, instead of what you desire.
2. Changing Requirements — welcome changes in the lives of your beneficiaries during the program development. The focus is not on the completion of a project but on creating a better life for the people.
3. Frequent Delivery — break the entire product into smaller parts and keep on delivering those parts regularly welcoming feedback frequently. This will keep the beneficiaries and funders engaged.
4. Communicate Regularly — communicate frequently with all the teams no matter where they are located with the help of online or offline modes of communication.
5. Support Team Members — build a team of motivated individuals and give them the environment in which they can thrive, and trust them that they will get the job done.
6. Face-to-face Communication — emails and messages are important; however, they can never be substituted by an engaging face-to-face productive conversation with your team or beneficiaries.
7. Measure Work Progress — the best way to measure the progress being made is by shipping the deliverables to the customers as fast as possible, and seeking their feedback. Thereafter, the tasks can be closed and the teams can start working on other parts of the project.
8. Development Process — having steady and continuous progress is better than bursts of productive hours. This is helpful not just for the work delivered, but also for boosting the morale of the team and avoiding burnout.
9. Good Design — there’s a wealth of articles on the internet about good design, which is rooted in the philosophy of design thinking. Starters can look at the principles of good design by Dieter Rams and Human-Centered Design by ideo.org
10. Simplicity and prioritizing— the teams should focus their efforts on the most value-driving tasks for the teams without getting lost in the weeds of details, that may not always be required. For example, deliberating on internal documentation format is less important as compared to the external documentation delivery that needs to be prioritized.
11. Have self-organizing teams— practicing a flat architecture as much as possible helps teams focus, and avoid the politics seen often at the organizations. Everyone is equal to each other and each person has a specific task to do on the team.
12. Reflect and Adjust Regularly — having a quarterly retrospective meeting is important for teams to reflect on what worked for them, and what didn’t, consequently changing their course of action. Experimenting with different things is always beneficial.

Seven steps for creating an agile culture in your organization

You don’t have to start using SCRUM and KANBAN in order to make your organization agile. You could ameliorate agility in your organization by creating a culture that supports the agile manifesto. These are the simple seven steps for doing so.

1. Empower the team — The first and foremost step you can take in your organization is to empower the team to make decisions on its own, and decide to work the way it finds most suitable for its survival (definitely, under legal and ethical constraints). A team can never grow if every single thing is decided by the manager.
2. Build a collaborative environment — When an organization creates a collaborative environment in the organization, then the employees feel valued, and they strive to do better than what they can do. Always include the suggestions put forth by the team members. It is worth mentioning that these suggestions should always provide value to the customer. When two contrasting ideas come from the team members, always think from the perspective of the customers by asking them what will they want.
3. Promote flexibility, agility, and adaptability — Deadlines are very important; however, if it is seen during the project cycle that some tasks need to move here and there in order to accommodate the needs of the beneficiaries, always have the flexibility to do so. Most adaptable teams are the most successful. For example, if you have prepared a lesson plan for teaching students, but the students want to learn a similar, though not exact thing, try to do what they need to engage them.
4. Have shorter delivery cycles — Instead of delivering one large chunk of work at the end of the year, divide the program into various parts, and then deliver it monthly or quarterly. For example, share the progress of the tasks achieved and seek feedback from your funders about those.
5. Don’t plan everything for long ahead — Instead of planning everything in detail at the very onset of the project, have larger buckets of work that need to be done. This will allow the team to be flexible. For example, if doing an afforestation project, do not list out which person will be getting trees from which location on which date four months from now. This is a highly inflexible way of planning. An alternative could be “procure trees from a local nursery”.
6. Explain what you want and what you don’t want — During the weekly meetings, explain to your team what is it that the beneficiaries want, and what is it that they don’t. This will help the teams to prioritize the features that bring the highest value to their customers. When a team is putting effort into something that is not required by the customer to get a job done, it shouldn’t be put up on the priority list. This requires constant communication. (Tip: There’s a reason a Product Owner is needed in Agile organizations.)
7. Permit (ethical) mistakes — When your team is trying out something new, mistakes are bound to happen. Let the members of the team innovate and think outside of the box, instead of following a set procedure of doing work. Having said that, some things are non-negotiable. For example, doing something that hampers the privacy of an individual and can get them profiled for something is best avoided.

I am confident that now you understand the theoretical aspects of the agile manifesto, the principles, and what you need to do to create an agile culture in your organization. The next part of this tutorial will focus on the practical aspects of doing an agile project. Don’t forget to share your comments and experiences.