So Agile is a different way of working. Agile is more about talking than writing. Agile is about small steps done often over a long project plan. Agile encourages change. And Agile empowers people to act autonomously. Let's just clarify what Agile isn't to help us understand what it is. Agile is not anti-process or anti-management. But it could be easy to see how people might view it in this way. From the outside it can perhaps appear unstructured or maybe even chaotic. Where is the critical path? How do you quantify and stay within a budget if you worked only to fortnightly sprints? Now these are all reasonable assumptions and issues to make. If we come directly from a Waterfall Project Management perspective. So let's deconstruct these assumptions a little bit to help us. Agile is not a threat to project management or project leadership. The roles in an Agile project are different than a Waterfall project. And so is how we approach prioritization and how we define the path of a project. 

However the notion of ownership, risk and accountability are still inherent to Agile projects. Just as they are key aspects of a non-Agile project. So to begin thinking in an Agile way we first need to start thinking differently. First we need to be user centric. We need to encourage a business approach that aligns development with customer needs and company goals. We need to encourage frequent inspection and adaptation. So we need to encourage and welcome reviews. Welcome feedback and ultimately encourage change. Quite a different way of thinking. We need to adopt a leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organization and accountability. So we need to trust people to do a good job without them needing to be managed, micromanaged via a project manager or a project management timeline. Last of all we need to remember to communicate best practices so that we can allow and create an environment for rapid-develop delivery of high quality projects. And that's an important aspect to a successful Agile project. 

So Agile is a way of working based on a series of principles. The concept of principles can sound a bit scary, right? But don't worry. They are more about guiding principles than rules that you have to follow. It's very unlikely that someone on a project is going to ask you to name the 12 principles of Agile but they might however expect you to understand the roles and responsibilities of the product owner, the scrum master and expect you to know what is required from the product backlog or from a stand up meeting. So keep engaged as we learn more about these constructs.