NextGen Agile
Agile for the Projects Scrum Was Never Built to Handle
A 4-minute read for experienced project managers ready to elevate their impact.
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Each week, I tackle reader questions about PMP preparation, implementing PMP in real-life projects, and a career as a Senior Project Manager.
This Week at a Glance:
The simple project
NextGen Agile: Agile for the Projects Scrum Was Never Built to Handle
Everyone is looking for PMP shortcuts
“Oh, that was an easy project; the project manager just had to organize meetings”
A project handled well looks simple.
But here is what is going on behind the scenes. There is a project manager holding everything together. And most of the time, no one notices.
Because when the work is going well, people think nothing hard is happening.
But that is not true.
A lot is happening at the same time.
→ People are asking for changes while work is already in progress
→ Deadlines are shifting but the final date still needs to stay the same
→ Different teams are working in different ways and still need to match up
→ Small issues are coming up every day and need quick answers
→ Information is coming from many directions and needs to be sorted out
The project manager sits in the middle of all of this.
They take messy work and make it clear.
They take confusion and turn it into a plan people can follow.
They make sure everyone knows what to do next, even when things change.
They check in with people again and again so nothing is missed.
They solve small problems before they turn into big problems.
They remind people of deadlines without making it feel like pressure.
They keep track of many tasks at once so the team does not have to.
From the outside, the project looks smooth and simple. People think the work was easy. But it only looks easy because someone is doing the hard part in the background.
A good project manager does not always get credit in the moment.
Because their work is not loud.
Their work is steady.
And when they do it well, everything just works.
NextGen Agile
Agile for the Projects Scrum Was Never Built to Handle
After the first presentation of Scrum in 1995, agile changed the way software development teams work. It gave us shorter feedback loops, closer collaboration, incremental delivery, and a healthier skepticism toward big upfront plans, full designs, and complete requirement lists.
But many organizations now face a different question: What happens when the project involves deliverables beyond software? What to do when activities such as decision-making, problem-solving, and risk management span more than one team? When the benefits call for strategic results rather than simply fulfilling the product backlog? If the pace is too fast to be managed by classic agile ceremonies like daily standups and Scrum of Scrums?
This is where Next-Generation Agile comes in. NextGen Agile (NGA) is not another branded agile framework, rehashing existing roles by renaming them ‘release train engineer’ to create the impression of novelty. NGA is better understood as a systems-thinking theoretical foundation for project management, supported by practical agile techniques that help teams manage uncertainty across the full project lifecycle: from strategy inception to project selection, execution, coordination, adaptation, and organizational learning.
The core idea behind NGA is simple but powerful: The role of projects in the organization is to address unique assignments that the standing organization is ill-equipped to fulfill, due to a lack of knowledge, technology, or capacity. A temporary organization is assigned with capabilities to match the challenge. Implicitly, project work is inherently uncertain; achieving project success depends on systematically reducing uncertainty by making more information available for effective and efficient decision-making, problem-solving, and deliverable creation.
Traditional agile methods, such as Scrum, are effective at reducing uncertainty primarily during the execution stage of a project, notably in the software domain. Agile methods effectively help teams clarify requirements through use cases and user stories, prioritize work using a product backlog, test design decisions during demos, refine throughput estimates using a burndown rate, and learn through frequent feedback in retrospectives.
But these techniques are most effective in software-related assignments, where work can be delivered incrementally, changed relatively easily at low cost, and progress is measured by approved working features. In Scrum, the deliverable is consistent: working software at the end of each sprint. Rejected software can usually be reworked to meet requirements; there are no sunk material costs, just work hours.
Many real-world projects do not look like that. In industrial projects, the deliverables depend on decisions that are often not yet made. In transformation programs, infrastructure work, regulatory change, and large cross-functional enterprise initiatives, there is a need for managing strategic dependencies, complex stakeholder landscapes, physical constraints, long planning horizons, and consequences that extend far beyond a single delivery team working on a product backlog.
In a perfect world, where all relevant information is available and therefore no uncertainty exists, these challenges would pose no problems. In practice, relevant information is either unavailable or one is unaware of its relevance or existence. This principle is visualized in the uncertainty matrix. The uncertainty matrix not only provides a visual definition of uncertainty but also the foundation for uncertainty management strategies:
Raise information awareness
Increase information availability
Improve the effective use of information
Maximize information efficiency.
Where information effectiveness is about achieving the right results and outcomes with the information available. Information efficiency concerns the time and effort required to gather, process, distribute, and visualize information necessary for planning, design, creation, and control activities in a project.
Uncertainty manifests itself in two ways. Direct uncertainty concerns questions such as: What are our stakeholders’ interests? Do we understand their requirements? Are we making the right decision here? Have we chosen the right solution? Will this risk occur, and if so, what will be the impact? How do I fix this problem? How accurate are the cost and time estimates for the respective solutions or alternatives?
The second type is inherent uncertainty: What stakeholders, requirements, risks, problems, dependencies, and constraints are we not yet aware of? The essence of uncertainty management is asking: What are we not seeing, and as a result, is not effectively addressed in our plans? Any unidentified stakeholder need, project constraint, activity dependency, or prerequisite will cause the plan to fail at some point.
Note that the uncertainty question is fundamentally different from the risk question: What are the missing pieces in our project plan versus what could potentially go wrong given plan? Any missing information, poorly crafted or even unrealistic plans, and inaccurate estimates will all cause a plan to fail, regardless of whether a specific risk materializes. For this reason, risk management alone is insufficient to achieve project success.
Theory aside, a set of NextGen Agile techniques makes the uncertainty-reduction strategies concrete.
1. The One Breath Challenge asks teams to define important project terms so clearly that they can be explained in one breath. If a team cannot briefly explain what “scope,” “success,” “benefit,” or “done” means, the concept is probably still too ambiguous to guide decisions based on common understanding.
2. Switching Thinking Mode technique helps teams become aware of how they think together. Are they analyzing, deciding, exploring, challenging, or simply repeating opinions? The goal is not just collaboration, but effective collective thinking.
3. Strategic Step Transformation connects the project to the larger organizational system. A local improvement can still damage overall performance if it conflicts with strategy, other initiatives, or operational realities.
4. The Project Methodology Framework asks whether the chosen project method actually fits the assignment. This is important because “being agile” is not the goal. Choosing the right method for the project is.
5. The Project Elevator Pitch clarifies the why, what, and how of a project for creating a project directive. It helps teams capture scope, mission, justification, and uncertainty concisely before the project gathers momentum in the wrong direction.
6. The Project Success Paradigm challenges one of the biggest weaknesses in project management: many projects start without a sufficiently clear definition of success. Creating the desired deliverables is not enough. Success must include addressing drivers, measuring benefits, defining outcomes, and stakeholder satisfaction.
7. The Project Metadata Technique helps teams manage the growing flood of project information. Instead of producing more documents, it asks how information can be tagged, structured, and connected so that people can quickly find what matters: decisions, assumptions, risks, dependencies, responsibilities, and open questions.
8. Result Breakdown Structures clarify scope by structuring project results in a way that supports estimation, tracking, and shared understanding.
9. Power Kanban extends the Kanban idea beyond simple task tracking. It helps coordinate work across teams, dependencies, decisions, dashboards, and program-level visibility.
10. Agile Rolling Wave planning accepts that distant future work cannot be planned in the same detail as near-term work. The project is planned in waves of decreasing detail: the next wave is planned concretely, the following wave more roughly, and later waves only at a high level for the full project. As new information becomes available and uncertainty decreases, each upcoming wave is refined in more detail.
11. In-Flight Guidance applies the mindset of continuous orientation and adaptation to the plan. The project plan is not a prophecy; it is a hypothesis. Teams need mechanisms to detect deviation, prepare options, and act before risks become crises.
12. The Project Information Blueprint focuses on designing project information flows deliberately. It asks what information is needed, who needs it, where it should live, how it should be updated, and how the team can reduce the effort required to find, share, and use it.
Note that NextGen Agile does not replace Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, PRINCE2, PMP, or other methods; it complements them by addressing limitations and provides a theoretical framework for an essentially empirical method. NGA poses the fundamental question in any project: Which uncertainties are threatening the project outcome, and which techniques can we deploy to reduce them?
This makes NextGen Agile knowledge especially relevant for leaders, PMOs, program managers, and project managers working in environments where classic agile feels helpful but insufficient. Because in complex projects, the winning team is not the one that follows a framework most faithfully. It is the one that learns fastest, sees the system most clearly, coordinates most effectively, and adapts before reality forces it to.
Are you interested?
1. Join the PMI Darmstadt session on moving from project risk to mastering project uncertainty.
Sources: The Hyves Next Generation Agile Handbook; Project management software supporting NGA
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