Agile Mapping for PMBOK Process Groups

Most of the organizations that develop software products employ standard project management practices and expect their employees to follow those process in their daily work at the organizations. In many of the prodcut development efforts that I worked I have had a Project Manager trained in PMBOK practices help manage the project at the enterprise level.
When teams switch to Agile/SCRUM Product development there is a change in how things are done and many times it appears as if there is a conflict between the PMBOK practices and Agile methodology.




In reality this need not be the case, agile practices can easily fit into PMBOK constructs and help develop products in a faster,leaner way. Similarly PMBOK prctices which looks like they are more suited for Waterfall development can be adapted to Agile methodology easily if we undersatnd the mapping between the two. The mapping of PMBOK and Agile methodology can help getting Agile accepted by the enterprise without much difficulty.
PMBOK guide says Projects are accompolished through process and espouses major processes that needs to applied in every project some form of the other to successfully complete the project. These processes are aggregated into five groups defined as the Project Management Process Groups:

• Initating Process Group
• Planning Process Group
• Executing Process Group
• Monitoring and Controlling Process Group
• Closing Process Group.

An undelying concept of the interaction between the process groups is the Plan - Do - Check - Act cyle from the TQM pronciples by Deming which the Agile Practioners are familiar with.

With this concept behind the PMBOK Process groups it becomes very easy to map the Agile Process Flow to the PMBOK process group flow. Let us see how this plays out.

The PMBOK process groups are not alien to the Agile/Scrum process flow. This kind of mapping can be used as a starting point of the conversation between the Scrum product owner and Project Manager to identify how the Agile mode of working can co exist with the enterprise level PMBOK processes in the organization.