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Agile Project Management vs Agile Product Management

Note that these opinions, like many others on this wiki, are not results of empirical research, but rather deducted from common sense. Subject them to reasoning specific to your own context and situation.

Many organizations starting off with agile choose a project as the sandbox for trying out a methodology like Scrum. There is nothing wrong with this, but over time, we want to find the optimal organization for productivity and efficiency.

Product oriented or project oriented

Let us start off with picturing some different kind of organizations. They are all modern in the sense that they relatively flat and allow teams with concerns across of each other:

  • Divisions by technology, project oriented. Codebase gets created in project, thereafter kept in maintenance mode.
  • Division by functionality, project oriented.
  • Product oriented, divided by customer branch.
  • ....

TODO: Write more on this. Key is that in a good organization, doing good stuff gets rewarded, and doing bad stuff drives for improvement (learning from mistakes). Defining 'good stuff', and 'reward' quickly gets context specific. We want the incomes and expenses which are caused by, or earned by the team to be in the same budget. Think power-usage, keeping the power-usage of the system low should come back as value for the team (Green IT ftw). At the same time, we want the rewards of using Continuous Integration to be greatly outweigh the costs of running the CI server (because bugs are more expensive than power).

Is Which are the better kind of organization for an agile team?

Line-oriented or product oriented?

Agile teams want stability in size and velocity. Is this possible in project mode?

A project has a deadline. The team (which was just about to become really efficient) is dissolved. The product gets "done". But SW is always developed and changed. The demand for resources will perhaps never be zero.

  • http://www.javaworld.com/community/node/874
  • http://tfnico.blogspot.com/2008/12/projects-are-bad-for-software.html

Resources

See also