Combiner Agile et PRINCE2
February 2, 2008 – 6:39 pmPRINCE2 est un méthode de gestion de projet très structurée tandis qu’Agile penche vers une approche plus souple et adaptative.
Plusieurs project manager - blogger abordent la question de l’intérêt qu’il y a à combiner Agile et PRINCE2.
Yves Hanoulle de la société paircoaching en belgique, se demande pourquoi de plus en plus d’offre d’emploi demande une certification PRINCE2 avec une expérience de développement de type AGILE. Pour lui, cela vient du fait que l’équipe de développement travaille avec AGILE tandis que l’expérience PRINCE2 a été rajoutée lors de la composition de l’annonce, peut être dans un but de rassurer le recruteur.
Craig Cockburn en Ecosse, a un article intéressant sur le sujet PRINCE2 + AGILE = commen sense. PRINCE2 est logique, linéaire et raisonnable. PRINCE2 est construit autour du contrôle des phases, des composants et des intervenants du projet. Mais cette méthodologie souffre des défauts des méthodes de type waterfall, une difficulté intrinsèque à prendre en compte les changements de façon souple. AGILE est au contraire construite pour gérer les nombreux changements qui surviennent tout au long du projet. Les 2 approches sont donc complémentaires. 2 articles supportent son argumentaire : un article de Agile Alliance sur l’utilisation de DSDM avec PRINCE2 ainsi qu’un white paper sur l’intégration de DSDM dans un environnement PRINCE2 . DSDM est une méthode inspirée d’AGILE.
Le sujet est aussi évoqué par Ann T Danby, USA, dans son post Waterfall and Agile.
Pour Scoot, UK, Agile s’occupe principalement de livrer le soft et est donc plus concentré sur les aspects Fonctions et Qualité que sur les aspects Coûts et Délais. D’où une certaine difficulté d’adoption pour des chefs de projets et des entreprises plus habitiués à des méthodologies de type PRINCE2.
Update on Feb the 4th.
OK I’ll switch to English as more people do blog/write about PRINCE2 and Agile in English than in French.
Graham Seaman also wonders Can PRINCE2 be agile?
A very thorough post analyzing how can Agile be integrated or reconciled with PRINCE2. Check out also Julian Harris Spreadsheet relating PRINCE2 sub processes with Scrum.
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2 Responses to “Combiner Agile et PRINCE2”
You got my point exactly. In this case it was clearly a sign that the person doing the hiring did not understand what he is talking about.
I agree that in some cases it can be a good thing. I’m not sure I buy Crai’s points.
“Prince 2 is about project control, control is clearly a Good Thing”.
For me that is not that clearly. And especially not combined with agile.
Agile is about giving the responsibility to the team.
I do understand that in some companies Prince2 is the default methodology. I also understand that it might not be a good thing for all project. So by combining both methodologies (Agile is not a methodology but that is another discussion) they hope to get the project going, and still geting the project finished on time etc.
For me his is a sign that they avoid discussion. If Prince2 does not work for that kind of project, it should be made clear to upper managment that having a default project methodology is not a good thing for this company. Avoiding that kind of hard discussions at the beginning of a project is a bad start. It might came back later to hunt you. In most of these cases Scrum + XP is a better combination.
By YvesHanoulle on Feb 2, 2008
Ann R Dandy main remark is that agile will bring to much different versions to the market and that the client will not like it.
For me that is a non-issue as not every sprint or iteration should be released life. And if they are, the clients only install the versions they like. In fact in the case of her example it might be that the program she installed years ago, has just one small feature she likes. That one feature could have been released 2 months after her initial install. Then she did not have to wiat 5 years for it. And if you have such small iterations upgrading typically goes much easier. The main reasons why we don’t like upgrades is because these installations of these big programs are such a mess. In my agile projects we work on installations from the very beginning. That means by the time we have a serious program, the installations is done very easy.
By YvesHanoulle on Feb 2, 2008