Working in an agile environment is defined as doing work with an iterative approach. It's about delivering value to customers faster and with fewer headaches. Instead of doing all your organizing and planning up front, an agile team plans in small increments, executing work and delivering value all along the way. However, one of the greatest challenges a project manager faces is what to do when plan have to change: insert ‘agile panic’ here. 

The conservative waterfall approach to project management is incredibly useful but it doesn't provide the same level of flexibility an agile style does to handle massive amounts of change. Let’s face it, plans change. It’s inevitable and when things change, much of predicative planning work goes out the window. What an agile approach brings is the ability to be flexible and to do incremental work while still honoring the big-picture planning. 

High achieving project teams that practice a more predicative strategy often find themselves driven to ‘agile panic’. Do you find yourself in ‘agile panic’ on your projects? When agile saves the day in our projects' riskiest moments, shouldn’t we learn to apply those same principals all along the project way? 

Being an agile project manager doesn't have to be complicated. You don't have to be certified in agile as a project management professional in order to deliver projects in an agile way. A friend of mine, @RobynAshton, who’s an agile expert says agile is a mindset. 

The world has changed. Gone are the easily predictable and never moving market conditions. Now, change is everywhere and planning for change requires an agile mindset because it better equips us to thrive. 

In my own experience as a PM, I am reminded that whatever approach the project has used up until that moment of change, the change itself requires an agile mindset to navigate to success. 

In trying to avoid agile panic, lets adopt an agile mind set all along the way so project risk can be greatly reduced. Let’s level up and look for opportunities to learn about what it means to have an agile mindset. And then, when we are informed, we can adopt those practices in every area of our project where it makes sense to do so. 

PMI has a great micro-credential called Agile Hybrid Pro

But, at the very least, pick a book from this list of 15 recommendations and stop the ‘agile panic’. Get ahead of it and adopt a mindset that is agile for change. 

Adopting an agile mindset,

(a.k.a. The Feisty PM)