The Gestalt of Cheetah Agile Projects
Learn how to keep your projects small and finish them fast – become Cheetah Agile Certified
Sometimes it seems like project managers can make things a lot more complicated than it needs to be for doing projects. It’s one of the reasons I was so attracted to Agile Project Management in the early days about 15 years ago. But anymore, even with something that used to be simple like Agile, there are now a myriad of complex ways to do projects using agile like methodologies. Agile has now become an umbrella term related to how to manage projects with evolving requirements for fast changing technologies. It’s no longer the agile project approach from its origins.
I realized that we as a profession in project management have lost our way with respect to keeping things small and simple with projects. I started my career as an Aerospace Engineer in the systems engineering world, where projects are much smaller than programs. Robust system engineering tools exist to manage the development of these complex systems like planes, large buildings, or large tech system rollouts. Project management methodologies were originally created there to manage the smaller project elements of these larger programs.
It does seem natural when you create a profession around what started out as a simple management practice for the smaller project elements of programs, those who attained the new professional standing would want to bring more prestige to this profession by making methods and processes more complex. The issue here though, there already exist well-established systems engineering processes, tools and techniques for large, complex programs. The same is true for the very complex process of software development that some “agile” methodologies now try to address.
But, the majority of us manage small projects – well under $100,000 and lasting far less than three months. By making project management practices more and more complex to address programs that can and should be using system engineering tools, we risk making it harder for people to make heads or tails out of how to run a successful small project (which are most projects).
It was from this insight, that I wrote the book Cheetah Agile Projects. Small projects benefit from a simple approach to project management. Even more, being able to keep projects small and finish them fast, significantly improves the chance the larger program, they are a part of, will succeed. We do ourselves a significant disservice by making it more complicated than it needs to be do our smaller projects.
Learn how to keep your projects simple and finish them fast, become Cheetah Agile Certified.
Michelle LaBrosse, PMP, CCL, CAC, PMI-ACP, RYT
“The first thing my boss said when I told him I was interested in getting my PMP certification was that if I was going to do it, he’d heard Cheetah Learning was the best.”