Talk:Extreme project management

Should this entry be renamed to 'agile project management'?

Added Stub template.

This is really a well referenced article, but it doesn't really say anything concrete.

Deletion/merger?

I am unsure of how distinct this really is from project managment. Still there is a related article, I also recommended for deletion,"Megaprojects," for the same reasons. Still, there seems to be a great deal of popularity, and hence novelty and usefulness to this subject. Should this be merged with megaprojects?GESICC (talk) 16:14, 7 August 2016 (UTC)

I disagree. Extreme Project Management is a specific approach and methodology that is not the same as agile project management which is an umbrella term for a variety of approaches under a particular philosophy. XPM is appropriate for a specific kind of environment and is not suitable for general use. Using the analogy of juggling, any project manager is juggling multiple balls at once and trying not to drop the important ones. In XPM, you don't know what will come down. Stakeholders change, benefits are undefined, nobody can define the outcomes, conflicting demands, no agreement on what the project is or whether there should even be one, poor capability maturity in the senior leadership with a high expectation of success and where failure will be high profile. It's not for "I don't know what I want, but I'll know it when I see it" which is the environment where agile methods are great. It is for cases where someone at the top has made a political-style promise to get something nebulous done, without anyone having the authority or guts to challenge the original flawed commitment and yet still getting something positive from it. It is a method for showing progress when given a vague solution to a 'wicked problem'. Whereas project management is taking a organisation from one fixed known state to another fixed known state and agile project management is taking an organisation from delivering a known service or product to delivering a desired outcome with no fixed solution, XPM is taking a totally broken environment with a commitment to "Get it done!" where everything about 'it' is defined by everyone as "I don't know, but we must be seen to be delivering!". One can do so by telling lies, by spindoctoring, or by using XPM. Ultimately, any project is purely "Make the boss happy". XPM does so in an ethical way, despite the environment, but without having to fix the environment or culture first. That is neither agile (which requires a high level of maturity to work well), nor a megaproject (which are usually surprisingly straightforward). SandJ-on-WP (talk) 12:39, 16 February 2025 (UTC)