CM6223 Agile Project Management: A Comparative Analysis Report

This report provides a comparative analysis of Agile project management approaches, focusing on Scrum, Kanban, and Lean methodologies as implemented by Google, Spotify, and the Government Digital Service. It explores how each organization leverages these approaches to achieve continuous improvement and project success. The analysis covers key aspects such as making people awesome, ensuring safety, and facilitating rapid experimentation and learning. Similarities and differences between Google's Scrum approach, Spotify's Kanban approach, and the Government Digital Service's Lean approach are highlighted, with specific examples and references to support the findings. The report concludes by emphasizing the importance of cooperation, continuous improvement, and waste elimination in agile project management.

AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT APPROACHES 1
AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT APPROACHES
Student Name
Institution Affiliation
Facilitator
Course
Date

AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT APPROACHES 2
Introduction
Mainly aimed at facilitating continuous improvements, agile project management
approaches greatly increases project prospects for success. Different companies, however, use
different approaches to achieving their project management goals. Some of the frequently used
methods include Scrum, Kanban and lean. Google Company has been using the scrum approach;
Spotify uses Kanban approach while Government digital service utilizes the Lean project management
approach (Conforto and Amaral, 2016, p.10).
Making people awesome
As a huge company, every team of the Google Company has been operating differently because
the products are orthogonal to an extent that they require special treatment. A good example is
comparing the development process of google maps and that of google glass which has different
constraints and engineering specialties (Gold and Vassell, 2015, p.50). Google is famous for its rock
solid stability and quick iteration on its user’s feedback. Canary releases are among Google’s top secrets
which are aimed at ensuring stability and high-quality products. In canary release approach, Google
releases features to some of its users and if the features are not successful it reverts them to be fixed or
removed.
Spotify on the other hand, which is a music streaming service mainly on desktop and
smartphones providing a wide range of music served with virtually no lag uses Kanban in their
operations. The reason behind the adoption of this project management approach is because of the many
operations which are managed by a single operations team (Hoda and Murugesan, 2016, p.250). For
instance, at one moment the team may be designing a new site for the company and the next moment
will be modifying firewall rules for developers. Kanban approach has enabled the operations team to
plan far in advance while remaining proactive.

AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT APPROACHES 3
Lastly, the government digital service has been using the lean project management approach to
deploy resource management systems in parastatals. The main reason behind this approach in
government digital process is because public resources are regularly audited and hence it enables
different agencies to eliminate resource wastage, amplify learning, empower teams and build integrity
throughout the whole process (Kerzner and Kerzner, 2017).
Making safety a prerequisite
Comparing Google’s scrum approach with Spotify’s Kanban approach, there are some
similarities which come out clearly as well as differences. The key similarities include (Nicholas and
Steyn, 2017): providing the teams involved with efficient ways of working and ensuring that the main
focus of the two teams is based on delivering and minimizing wastage of resources
Their key differences on the other hand are: Scrum in Google has its specific principles and rules which
governs the project management team while Kanban in Spotify is just a workflow visualization tool
which has been put on top of the organizations existing process and the Scrum approach in Google
requires management, training and upfront investment while Kanban in Spotify does not involve all
those processes because it’s easy to understand
Experiment and learn rapidly
Comparing Google’s scrum approach with Government digital service’s approach, there are
some similarities which come out clearly as well as differences. The key similarities include (Pope-
Ruark, 2015, p.120): for instance, in their respective applications, both approaches have focused on
ensuring cooperation between employees and seem to focus on the end results as a very important
aspect. In regard to the execution of the two methods, both approaches have emphasized on holding
meetings in the morning to briefly evaluate and brainstorm what must be done and the two approaches
also adhere to the principle of continuous improvement to ensure rapid learning.

AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT APPROACHES 4
Their key differences on the other hand are: Lean has been applied to improve the entire
organization while scrum, on the other hand, has been applied within the context of the management
team and in lean, product development is maintained up to the final stage while in the scrum,
development of a product is done in stages also known as sprints.
Delivering value continuously
Comparing Spotify’s Kanban approach with Government digital service’s Lean approach, there
are some similarities which come out clearly as well as differences. The key similarities include
(Serrador, and Pinto, 2015, p.1050): In their respective applications, both approaches have focused on
ensuring cooperation between employees and the two approaches also adhere to the principle of
continuous improvement
Their key differences on the other hand are that lean approach in the government digital
service has mainly focused on waste elimination and anything that doesn’t impact the
functionality of the final product positively is considered as waste while Kanban’s Spotify main
aim is to optimize the manufacturing process by regulating raw material supply.
References
Conforto, E.C., and Amaral, D.C., 2016. Agile project management and stage-gate model—A
hybrid framework for technology-based companies. Journal of Engineering and Technology
Management, 40, pp.1-14.
Gold, B. and Vassell, C., 2015, November. Using risk management to balance agile methods: A
study of the Scrum process. In Knowledge-Based Engineering and Innovation (KBEI), 2015 2nd
International Conference on (pp. 49-54). IEEE.

AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT APPROACHES 5
Hoda, R. and Murugesan, L.K., 2016. Multi-level agile project management challenges: A self-
organizing team perspective. Journal of Systems and Software, 117, pp.245-257.
Layton, M.C. and Ostermiller, S.J., 2017. Agile project management for dummies. John Wiley &
Sons.
Kerzner, H. and Kerzner, H.R., 2017. Project management: a systems approach to planning,
scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.
Nicholas, J.M. and Steyn, H., 2017. Project management for engineering, business, and
technology. Routledge.
Pope-Ruark, R., 2015. Introducing agile project management strategies in technical and
professional communication courses. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 29(1),
pp.112-133.
Serrador, P. and Pinto, J.K., 2015. Does Agile work?—A quantitative analysis of agile project
success. International Journal of Project Management, 33(5), pp.1040-1051.