Project management is a diverse field that offers a wide variety of career possibilities, making it a great choice if you’re looking for a path with options and a high pay range. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), project management specialists earn a mean annual wage of $84,290. It isn’t uncommon, however, to find jobs in the six-figure range. Agile project management, a specific methodology in the PM field, is rapidly becoming a tool that employers and clients look for when considering their project management team. If you’re looking to enhance your knowledge and expand your resume, adding agile project management to your skillset can help increase your marketability and expertise.

What Is a Project Manager?

Project managers play a huge role in a business’s efficiency, from supervising budget to ensuring the timeliness of projects. The project manager handles the entire scope of a project, making them a deeply important part of any successful organization. According to a Project Management Institute (PMI) report, organizations that use proven project management practices actually waste 28 times less money because projects end up being more successful than those without project managers.

Being so involved in a company’s success can be challenging, which is why project managers have many different management pathways that they use in order to make their day-to-days flow more smoothly. The most traditional approach is waterfall, and it emphasizes operating in a linear motion from one point to the next within a project’s development. With this method, each phase of the project must finish before the next can begin. However, even the "best laid plans" are subject to change based on unforeseen circumstances, and a linear approach often removes key stakeholder input as a project is executed from phase to phase. Dependent upon the project, a different approach may be necessary.

Eddie Merla, a project management professor at Rice University, used construction as an example of good waterfall technique and compared it to another form known as agile project management. “Traditional works very well for building a bridge. You wouldn't want to rethink your bridge when you're halfway across the water. It's too late, you already have half the bridge built. Now with agile, what's different is that it's still project management. You still have a project. You still have a goal. But the difference is that you learn as you go.”

What Is Agile Project Management?

Agile project management is a methodology that emphasizes flexibility through shorter development cycles, or “sprints.” With agile, project managers make sure to communicate with clients at every step, instead of simply giving the client a fully-fledged project at the end.

"Each time you release value, you find out what worked, what didn't work, and what could be improved,” Merla said. “And then you incorporate that into the next iteration. So, a project could take a couple of years, but you might have 20 iterations in that year. Every iteration, you're producing something of value.”

Having the ability to change and learn as you go can greatly increase the likelihood of customer satisfaction and project success. Sharing valuable deliverables throughout the process decreases the likelihood of missed objectives and ensures that a product is in line with the client’s vision throughout every step of its lifespan.

Is Agile Right for You?

In a field like project management, having a wide set of tools at your disposal is not only encouraged, but necessary. Being able to meet the needs of the client, as well as the needs of the specific project itself, takes a comprehensive knowledge of all kinds of methodologies. Agile is high on the list of meaningful approaches that can help you meet project goals and exceed client expectations.

Merla, who holds both the Project Management Professional credential and the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner credential, said that he recommends agile to all young professionals, regardless of the industry. Merla gave an example of an oil and gas PM who didn’t think agile would be useful in his industry, but who found a use for the certification when working on a project for a client who asked specifically for an agile approach.

"There were portions of the project where it was open to discovery and to experimentation, adaptation, and that's the value of using that agile,” explained Merla. “So I do recommend every traditional project manager should also take this just as a way to build on their toolkit. Good project managers like tools. So if you have more tools in your toolkit, it's going to make you more valuable to the organization.”

Getting your certificate in agile project management can be a rewarding experience for all professionals. Merla described the certificate program at Rice University by comparing it to agile itself.

“Just like an agile project, it’s more focused on collaboration and interactions,” Merla said. “In fact, one of our mantras is people and interactions over lecture. We'll focus on the people and their interactions. Get people involved.” He then went on to explain what the course entails, and how it progresses in a flexible fashion that’s similar to an agile project.

“We start with the tools. We start working the methods. We do deep dive into Scrum because Scrum is probably the most popular agile method out there,” Merla explained. “And then from that point forward in the course, we continue with learning team building techniques, collaboration techniques, because another thing that agile promotes, which could be different than traditional, is they promote what are called self-organizing teams. So it truly is a test of leadership.”

Learning agile project management is an invaluable asset at any stage of a professional career, from cubicle to C-suite. This value is demonstrated in the diversity of professionals who take the Agile Project Management course semester over semester. Merla even described how having a range of people from different backgrounds and of different ages helps to make the course more fulfilling, because mixing those various experiences can help to give students a more well-rounded understanding of different trades and experiences.

“Almost all of them say that the biggest takeaway from the training was the people interactions, just working with people from different industries, different perspectives,” Merla said. “It truly is an opportunity to interact and share ideas and to truly learn from the experience.”

If you’re considering advancing your career with a project management certificate, join an online information session to find out more about whether Rice’s program might be right for you.