Wednesday, February 13, 2008

PRINCE2 and Agility

Over the past couple of years, I've dabbled around the fringes of agile programming/project management mostly looking at XP, but I have to confess that I've always struggled to reconcile agility and the structured control delivered by PRINCE2. I've always erred towards early, hands-on prototypes (whether paper or digital), prioritised requirements lists, and facilitated, collaborative meetings, so I was delighted to discover that all three of these feature strongly in DSDM. I've now taken the plunge, and am reading (the - so far - excellent) short tome on merging DSDM with PRINCE2, "Agile Project Management" by Keith Richards. I'm starting to come around to the idea that web projects might be ideally suited to a stripped-down mix of the two (perhaps something more PRIDE on the PRINCE2 side). Certainly the inherent difficulties of managing rapidly moving web projects within a PRINCE2 change management framework appear to be addressed by such an approach, as would integrating early and frequent usability tests.