I asked Evan Leybourn this question. Evan pioneered the field of Agile Business Management; applying the successful concepts and practices from the Lean and Agile movements to corporate management. He keeps busy as a senior IT executive, business management consultant, non-executive director, conference speaker, internationally published author and father.
Evan Leybourn: That’s a surprisingly hard question to answer. In the first instance, the majority organizations do. Project management has been around; the same project management practice has been around since the 80’s. If I was to build a risk flow or a project management plan or a schedule, it wouldn’t really change whether I was looking at a project from 1985 or 2015. However, what we’re starting to see especially in an Agile context, larger organizations that adopt Agile tend to do so some within the context of a traditional project management approach. Now this has certain issues, implications where you lose some ability of adapting to change, but you gain some perceived reduction in risk of failure, or a simplification of selling the idea of Agile to the organization. 
We move now to say the high maturity organizations; the organizations that actually understand the adaptability in agility. And for them, there is entirely new ways of running projects which are actually not using projects at all. The problem with projects themselves is that they are highly risky and prone to failure. In fact there are studies by every single consultancy, every single organization like McKinsey and so forth, which looks at the failure rates of projects, the overspend of projects and I’m not just talking IT here; I’m talking across the board.
There was one study I saw recently which you may or you may not agree with the mass behind it, I know there’s been some controversy but which states were that the total cost of project failure in the United States per year is in the order of like 1.7 trillion. Something’s going wrong if there are numbers with the word trillion attached to it, attached to a concept of project management.
The idea in more mature organizations gets to the point to answer your question, is to actually move away from rigorous project controls and move towards a really adaptive approach where we have these concepts of continuous change and continuous delivery, where change or institutional organization change in what we know and be developed within the concept of a project can be developed incrementally or iteratively in a continuous fashion day after day, month after month, year after year.
Evan is the Business901 Podcast Guest Next Week
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