The New Alliance of Scrum and AgilePM

Agile Project Management (AgilePM®) is the world’s best framework for managing projects using agile tools, techniques and practices. Recently released v3 of AgilePM has Scrum at the core of it, providing the unbeatable combination. 

Agile Project Management is the fastest growing framework, with over 225,000 certified professionals, that guides professionals on how to manage their projects with agile mindset.

Agile Business Consortium introduced AgilePM in 2010 (based on DSDM) and in 2014 v2 of AgilePM was released. After 10 years of success of AgilePM v2, Agile Business Consortium has unveiled Agile Project Management v3 - AgilePM3. One of the major shakeup has been the introduction of Scrum within the framework. 

What is Project Management?

Project management is the art and science of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing set of inter-related tasks to meet specific objectives and achieve specific success criteria within specified time by a specially assembled team. The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals within the given constraints (primarily time, cost, quality and scope).

What is Scrum?

Scrum is the world’s most popular framework for developing, delivering and sustaining complex products through effective team collaboration. Scrum is not a process, technique or definitive method. Rather, it is a framework within which various processes and techniques can be employed.

Many in the agile fans-world believe Scrum to be a project management framework, however, the fact remains that Scrum is a product development framework not a project management framework. 

Product development primarily focuses on the what and the how of the way the product evolves to achieve its purpose, on the other hand project management focuses on the coordination and governance associated with the environment in which product development happens.

Scrum and AgilePM - The New Alliance 

Till the release of v3, AgilePM (for project management) and Scrum (for product development) have been two of the world’s leading agile approaches. Scrum no doubt served the product development very well but the broader business context, in the world we live in, needed more than product development conviction only. A vast majority of organizations, especially larger corporates, public sector bodies and charities organize their work as projects (and programmes), and rightly so.

Agile product delivery via Scrum could achieve only a fraction of its full potential when overseen by traditional project intellect. An attempt to use Scrum in an environment augmented for a traditional project approach is unlikely to work well unless the roles, responsibilities, customs, practices and, most importantly, the mindset associated with the defined approach is attuned. 

This created the perfect space for the marriage between Agile Project Management (AgilePM) and Scrum framework. Agile Business Consortium and APMG's AgilePM for Scrum introduced (in 2023) a framework that dealt with the coordination of multiple development teams in the context of a single outcome or product. It presented a strong customization of AgilePM (for agile project management) designed to integrate seamlessly with Scrum (for agile product development) in a single framework which intended to bring together the powerful simplicity and persuasive agility of Scrum for product development (as described in the Scrum Guide 2020) with key elements of AgilePM that bring agility to the much broader project context within any organization.

However, AgilePM for Scrum failed to attract the professionals and the time for Agile Project Management (AgilePM) update was almost due. Given this opportunity, Agile Business Consortium's team worked tirelessly over almost a year and Introduced Agile Project Management v3 - AgilePM3, delivering a flexible, full project lifecycle framework for organizations to deliver value from any discipline, industry, or function challenged by volatility, uncertainty complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) in their working environment. It offers a lightweight, scalable project approach that builds on the foundations of Scrum and it is seamlessly applicable to IT/software- and non-IT/software-centric projects and environments. 

Conclusion

Scrum guidance is now essential part of latest version of AgilePM and there is a heavy focus on VUCA in all aspects of project management, specially delivery aspects. There is enhanced focus throughout on project outcomes rather than outputs. AgilePM3 also focuses on the life of the solution beyond delivery instead of just endeavouring on delivering the solution itself. 

This alliance with Scrum has made AgilePM3 truly a human-centric approach to Agile Project Management!