In my last article I established that we have a shot at using PMBOK tools in Agile Management.  Today I want to take a look at how the PMBOK Process Groups map to Agile. As any PMP will tell you the five phases of a project (according to PMI) are:

1. Initiating
2. Planning
3. Executing
4. Controlling
5. Closing

While I will examine each in detail, let’s take a high level look at the above and compare it to one of the more prevalent Agile methodologies, Scrum.

Figure 1 - PMBOK Project Management Process Groups

Figure 2 - Simplified Scrum Process

From Figures 1&2 you the correlation between the PMBOK Process Groups and the steps of Scrum should be obvious.  For clarity, I am defining a project in terms of Scrum as a Release.  Some organizations may choose to define the project as the Sprint itself for the purpose of controlling products or services that don’t have the concept of a Release.

Here is the Process Group alignment matrix for some of the Agile Methodologies:

So again we see that PMBOK concepts hold up as we examine Agile in more detail.