It is the perennial question all project managers struggle with. Working today on the milestone list, WBS and Gantt charts for the project plan and I ponder the level of detail required and whether the project plan should follow an agile methodology. In practice I imagine most teams find a niche for this based on team experience, competence and overall sync within the team. For some teams everything does not need to be spelt out to the nth degree. Simple tasks can just be listed, resources allocated and the expectation that acceptance criteria, tests and deliverables would simply flow from it. The basic premise of agile where each iteration provides a testable, incremented piece of work would be hard to apply to a research project I’m thinking.
In the past I have worked in some really experienced teams and also some not so experienced teams. I see teams struggle grasping the concepts of agile with terms like ceremonies, retrospectives and burndowns. Whereas other teams do not require copious amounts of communication as they simply ‘get it’.
For the purposes of this project plan it is simply a representation of the logical approach to a research project. For something like this plan where the only ‘resource’ is the student themselves lots of detail is probably not needed. However for projects where a team of researchers are working to achieve common deliverables I can see the value in it.
My overall takeaway is that the project plan really follows a mostly waterfall, prescriptive approach. Most research projects I imagine would follow a linear based progression. Each milestone deliverable is required to be achieved before the next one can begin. While the research component may require a pivot on the initial argument position, I can’t see the need to apply an agile methodology to a research project? Perhaps I’m missing something?