Agile posits that a team’s overall execution of a project is optimized when the team is always working on the “right tasks,” and that those “right tasks” can only be defined for a relatively short time horizon.
- No location available
-

Some key Agile principles include: frequent iterations of “understand-requirements/plan/do/assess” cycles (a/k/a small and frequent product releases), a real commitment of the NPD team to planning tasks and assessing performance, the practice of working tasks sequentially rather than in parallel (thus forcing prioritization), test-driven development, and a product architecture that emerges/evolves rather than being pro-actively designed.
- No location available
-

In a high-uncertainty project, the critical path is fundamentally unknowable up front. Agile generally eliminates longer term planning and thus sacrifices longer-term project and product visibility (which is presumed unrealistic anyway). Instead, the Agile approach promises that the product you will get in six months will be better than anything you might have pre-planned, because you have optimized execution and eliminated wasteful efforts on pre-planning that would need to be reworked anyway. Agile thrives in a highly uncertain environment, committing NPD teams to a certain process that navigates uncertainty.
- No location available
-