Carry Out Big Projects at Home the Agile Way

Carry Out Big Projects at Home the Agile Way

If you have some big projects waiting to get done at home then you are probably pretty excited about them. We all love to see our houses improve when we carry out some work on them.

Whether it is a new garden, a bigger kitchen or anything else, carrying out this project in the smartest possible way will go a long way towards making it a success. Of course, not all of us have the experience of project management needed to feel confident about planning the whole thing.

Yet, there is a type of project management methodology called Agile that can work wonderfully well at home. You don’t need to have a lot of experience to make it work for you.

How Does It Work?

Agile training and use are now extremely popular in businesses, especially in the software development industry. However, it can be used in just about any other sort of environment. To put it simply, it is a project management methodology that focuses on rapid delivery of the finished results.

This makes it ideal if you want to see the finished article sooner rather than later. Another important aspect is that with Agile you need to assess the progress regularly and adapt to the results to date.

For example, if you are converting your basement into the bedroom, you don’t just plan all the work right at the beginning then wait until the end to see if it all ends well. Instead, you check on the work as you go, with a flexible approach that lets you change things if you see that it is going to be too dark, too cramped or whatever else crops up.

You will also work as a team and ensure that what you are delivering meets the needs of the person who is going to use it. So, if it is your daughter’s room then you will want to review the progress with her regularly, to see if it is on track to meet her expectations.

How Should You Use It?

You can use Agile project management techniques on just about any type of job that you want to do. It is a highly scalable approach, meaning that it is frequently used to manage huge projects with massive budgets and large teams.

Yet, if you are going to use this for the first time at home then it is best to start off with a modestly sized job. Of course, it can’t be too small or else you won’t be able to see the full range of benefits from doing this.

Therefore, you might like to try it with a mid-sized task such a remodelling a garden or re-designing a room. This should give you the confidence needed to take on bigger jobs in the future.

What Benefits Can You Expect to See?

At first, adopting a professional project management approach might seem like overkill. After all, this is the sort of methodology that is more often used to control big projects that have a lot of time and money at stake.

However, you might be convinced once you see the benefits that you can achieve by doing this. The first benefit that you should expect to see is that of delivering fast results, as this is one of the main advantages of the Agile approach.

Other benefits include being able to deliver excellent results, even in the face of unexpected challenges cropping up. Working with Agile also makes it easier to keep control over the budget and to keep the people who use the finished product (in this case your family) happy.