A Revolution in Project Management: History of Agile
On February 11–13, 2001, at The Lodge at Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah, seventeen people met to talk, ski, relax, and try to find common ground — and of course, to eat. What emerged was the Agile ‘Software Development’ Manifesto.
Agile Project Management have entered into our lives as an innovation that marked an era in the sector with the 21st century, managed to become one of the most used project management methods and the significance of this approach was once again understood after the Covid-19 pandemic. In this article, we will mention about how Agile approach, which is an indispensable part of project management in the IT sector, emerged and how come it has achieve to increase it’s popularity until today.
Agile methods are mostly based on Lean manufacturing principles that emerged in Toyota auto factories in the 1930s. However, the Agile Manifesto was originally put forward for software development teams. During the industry crisis of the 90s, the traditional project management method, Waterfall, fell down as a result of great delays in the delivery of technologies that respond to business needs and customer demands, which clearly demonstrated the necessity for a new project management approach.
At the end of 20th century, while start-ups like Google were able to produce more softwares with less time,tech giant companies were looking for ways to keep producing better softwares faster and protect their market share.
Even it was realized lately that the Waterfall method, traditionally used by large companies, was insufficient to meet the changing demands and constraints, but many projects had to be canceled in this process. This caused a huge loss of time and budget.
After all, in 2001, a group of thought leaders of the period brainstormed in order to produce more efficient projects in the software development process. Idea they agreed on was that companies were so focused on the planning and documentation phases even they forgot what they really needed to focus on: customer satisfaction.
The team introducing themselves as "Agile Alliance" brainstormed for 2 days and published the "Agile Manifesto" and "4 Main Articles and 12 Principles of Agile Software" to guide the entire industry.
Articles were written that referenced the category of “Light” or “Lightweight” processes. These articles referred to “Light methodologies, such as Extreme Programming, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, and SCRUM”. In conversations, no one really liked the moniker “Light”, but it seemed to stick for the time being.
According to the manifesto, project processes were now kept more flexible and more emphasis was placed on both team members and users rather than end products or deliveries. When many companies started to adopt this approach, it was understood that it could be used not only in software projects but also in projects in many fields, and dozens of different application forms were developed by integrating this revolutionary innovation into different sectors.
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