Agile Project Management in Action -- Part 2, Shaping the Context

by Rob Thomsett

As we discussed in the first of this series (see Agile Project Management E-Mail Advisor, 14 March 2002), the primary causes of project failure are from outside your project, in other words, the context of your project. APM breaks projects into two distinct but related elements: 1) the content; and 2) the context. The content involves the technical deliverables that your project is developing. For example, in an e-commerce project, the content would include the Web front-end, the business process design, the interface to the back-end systems, and so on. The second element, the context, includes the organizational culture, the people, and the political, financial, and managerial environment in which your project exists.