We Need Alternatives To Project Management: Here’s an Agile Alternative

Although we can learn a lot from Project Management, the theory and beliefs it stands on don’t hold for software delivery. We need something different. But is Agile enough? Yes, but…

Project management, as we know it, is a recent invention.

Though some argue it’s ancient, it’s really only become mainstream in the 20th century—not unlike computing.

Project management requires a rigid set of beliefs: the ability to plan ahead, follow a fixed schedule, and predict how what we do affects our goals before we even started working. And that’s the problem!

The Butterfly Effect

In 1961 Edward Lorenz was trying to model weather in his lab at MIT. This model would change the history of the world, and how we understand science, but Lorenz did not know it at the time.

After a long day of simulation, Lorenz stopped the model, noted down the values for the 12 variables and went home. To save time, he would restart the model with the numbers he had noted down the day before.

To his surprise, the model significantly deviated from the previous run.

Worried that there might be a bug in his code, he investigated only to find that the computer printed the variable values with 3 decimal places (after the comma), but internally it stored those values with 6 decimal places. So, and error of less than 0.0001 had made the model behave completely differently than the previous run!

This kind of error (0.0001) was less than our own weather measuring instruments could even measure.

Lorenz realized, a simple change (like a butterfly flapping its wings) can cause a large weather even elsewhere on the planet. Or at least that was the metaphor he used in a now seminal paper on what was later to be called Chaos Theory and even later Complexity Science.

Project Management vs. Reality

So what does Lorenz’s butterfly have to do with project management? Project management tries to model the world like Lorenz’s model did: it aims to control reality through linear planning. But just like the weather, real-world complexities—especially in software—can’t be managed with such precision.

Projects assume we know the scope, timeline, resources, and outcomes upfront. But, just like Lorenz’s model, project management has a fundamental flaw, it is not sufficiently granular to be able to correctly model the world it tries to “control” (and that’s the real term used in project management).

An example that many will recognize is that in a project world, it is assumed that we know exactly what needs to be done (scope), and by whom (resource management), and by when (time management), and with what outcome.

When it comes to software development, however it’s much more likely that you have “some” idea of what needs to be done, the people working on it will be called to do other things (e.g. support an older release), the timeline will usually be assumed to be fixed, but in reality will move according to customer/market needs, and the desired outcome – even when understood in advance – will change as soon as we see the first versions of the software running (customers change their minds and the scope!).

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There’s a Solution Though…

For anyone with experience in software development, the issues above will all seem familiar, but what are the solutions?

Agile, you say? Well, yes but…

Agile methods can be a huge improvement over Project Management, however there are a lot less Agile experts in the world then there are (wannabe) project managers, or managers that believe the world is linear and simple.

So, even where Agile is used, we often see the same linear planning, ossified approaches to delivery being used.

What we need is a different approach to managing work that is based on different principles from project management!

Agile principles are a great and inspiring set to start from, but we need to make them practical. We need to look at Software development with a different mindset. Here’s how.

The Solution: Agile For Businesses

To replace project management in software, we need more than just Agile. We need:

• Incremental funding of software efforts (this alone defeats key ideas in project management)
• An investment mindset instead of rigid planning (more on that in later articles)
• Experimentation as a default, not adherence to a predetermined plan
• End-to-end ownership rather than centralized, top-down control

And here is where the challenge really starts.

It’s not enough to have Scrum teams that are working within a Project Management (linear, predictive planning) organization. We need to have agility and adaptability at all levels of our organizations!

We’re going to talk a lot about this kind of approaches and organizations at the Global Agile Summit 2025 in Tallinn. So let us know what you have experimented with, and what questions you have. Leave a comment below, and help me prioritize the next set of posts!

Let’s take Agile all the way to 11!

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