Harvard Business Publishing and Agile..

I recently read an article from Harvard Business Publishing on "Why Good Projects Fail". As we all know, the failure rate for projects is very high; more than half of the projects fail! This is especially troublesome in Traditional Project Management as you would not know if the project is failing until it is too late (remember, one big bang delivery!)

In this Harvard Business Publishing, the author suggests using rapid-results initiatives in order to minimize and mitigate the risks of failure. What he means by that is "to use small projects designed to quickly delivery mini-versions of the big project's end results". Do you 'smell' Sprints here!?

He goes on to list several defining characteristics of this rapid-results initiatives approach such as:

* Results oriented (As we know, with each sprint, our goal is to deliver value to the Product Owner.)
* Vertical (Refers to Cross functional team)
* Fast (Refers to Sprints and Releases)

There are many parallels in this article and what we do in Agile landscape. Check out the article here to find out more details.