Agile and PMBOK: Playing Nicely?

We previously posted about the student paper winner from the PMI congress, “Agile and PMBOK© Project Management Techniques: Closer Than You Think.” I was curious what some Agile practitioners thought about Agile “playing nicely” with PMBOK—most of them couldn’t answer the question because they weren’t familiar enough with PMBOK. There seems to be a lack of understanding of traditional methods in the Agile community and vice versa.

How can we desegregate the two seemingly antithetical practices if both practitioners aren’t familiar with each other? Is it even possible? Is there such a thing as a project that needs an Agile touch? Or an Agile project that could use some traditional methods?

Mike Griffiths gives an overview of the idea. Here’s a more in-depth article on this possibility by Michele Slinger and a further dissection of the idea by Glen Alleman.

Alleman concludes, “It means that connecting agile with PMBOK will need some more work. More than just the process areas. Mike Dwyer and I tried this some time ago and then moved on to other things.”