Key Takeaways
- The agile phases (Envision, Speculate, Explore, Adapt, Close) merge an iterative deliver approach with explicit governance, the overlap of stages 3&4 define the loops of learning that enables agility.
- The common failing isn’t within the sprints; it lies in the infrastructure supporting them – no financial floor in Envision, no rate cards in Speculate, no billable back-end to the Explore, no portfolio view to the Adapt, no measurement into the Close.
- McKinsey reports that teams that incorporate agile principles-like an iterative approach to development-typically deliver projects more quickly (i.e. On average 20–30% Faster!). This is thanks in large part to their tightly knit “Explore and Adapt” feedback cycle, because if something’s not right-you can spot it early (before it gets too far out of alignment)-because at that point the price of being correct is relatively cheap.
- 60 percent of projects use agile or hybrid approach. The majority of enterprises use both approaches in a combination: agility for flexible deliverability and traditional milestone management for billing and governance/compliance.
- Kytes brings all agile steps together using a unified layer to facilitate the financial transaction when and where your sprints terminate.
QUICK ANSWER
The five defined phases of agile project management are Envision, Speculate, Explore, Adapt, and Close. It’s not like waterfall where it would flow logically through these phases-instead, phases 3 and 4 cycles through repeatedly until the vision is realized. Each sprint will go through phases 3 and 4. The gap is that, in many enterprise organizations, there simply isn’t a platform connecting the delivery of a sprint with the creation of invoices, the cost of resources with the project planning, or what was learned with future estimations.
Why Do Agile Phases Still Break Down at the Portfolio Level?
The director of programs at a 600-person IT engineering firm wrestled with an impossible problem. A pattern had been developing: their last three consecutive infrastructure projects had each missed their delivery dates by between four and six weeks. They had different teams, different clients, different technologystacks.
A program manager at a 700-person IT services firm had been practicing agile for 3 years. His teams knew the
Scrum ceremonies; sprints were two weeks long; retrospectives occurred; and the board was visual. But when the executive committee asked what was on track for the quarter, he could offer an answer. As real as in real-time-the answer was no.
The sprint health and portfolio health are two different metrics. His teams were cycling through the agile project management phases, so they were dealing with project management in terms of delivery. But a system didn’t exist connecting phase level progress to resource cost, billing status, and margin health. Each Adapt phase closed with a planning session predicated on budget availability that was never verified. And each close phase outputted lessons learned that wound up in a non-readable document. The agile phases were a functioning entity while the infrastructure that surrounds them was anything but. This is the moment of ending the sprint and commencing the invoice-the end of the delivery cycle and the commencement of the (invoiced) business cycle, except that the two are non-correlated systems.
What Are the Agile Phases of Project Management?
These steps were formalized within the project management, in the Adaptive Project Framework (APF) by Robert Wysocki, then matured with the disciplined agile delivery (DAD) of PMI. Today 60% of projects are already either on hybrid or agile processes compared to only 30% ten years ago. Agile phases: They provide a structure without eliminating flexibility.
Phase 1- Envision
Define the Vision Before You Build Anything
Envision defines the project objectives, the scope of the project, and the condition of satisfaction. It includes 4 components of envisioning: define a project vision statement (business outcome, not just deliverables); identify the core team and stakeholders; define the conditions of satisfaction (agreed between client, these criteria differ from requirements; requirement defines how it will be delivered while condition of satisfaction defines the outcome of having completed it); define initial budget in relation to actual resource costs
The most widespread Envision failure: using it like a kickoff, and not like a phase. As soon as the vision is underspecified, agile iterations will be conflated into direction. All your planning software would just put the vision, conditions of satisfaction, and original estimate in one system so each phase starts from there.
Phase 2- Speculate
Speculate creates a “just-in-time “plan, acknowledging requirements are ever-evolving. Four items are included: the initial product backlog, composed of ranked user stories, the scrum framework with its dimensions (length of sprints, members, velocity goals), the release plan delineating the first working version delivery date, and the estimation of the needed resources based on the actual cost of work, not just man hours.
As PMI’s 2024 Pulse of the Profession reports, nearly three out of four project professionals-73%-believe hybrid approaches will become increasingly common, and hybrid environments depend precisely on combining flexible, adaptive strategies with financial acumen. A resource plan for 12 without costs defined is not a plan-it’s an expectation.
Phase 3- Explore
Explore is the phase where all the work gets done rapid, repeated sprints, which follow a cycle of plan-build-review-plan… Each iteration yields a potentially releasable slice of working software, which is shared and reviewed with stakeholders to glean insights that shape the next sprint, and so on. Agile project management enables delivery performance to improve on average by 20-30%, claims McKinsey in an analysis of delivery performance. The 20-30% is the Explore: early detection of misaligned requirements, while easy to remediate, occurs by feeding that knowledge back into next rapid cycle.
The Four Scrum Ceremonies in the Explore Phase
Phase 4– Adapt
Turn Learning into Direction
Adapt is the conjunction in between the Explore cycles. It poses the only important question and that is: Knowing what we just discovered, what do we need to change. For getting Adapt wrong means letting it becomes skippable. If the team by-pass retrospectives and release reviews, it fails to build institutional learning that is the whole purpose of the agile phases.
Adapt Happens at Three Levels
Phase 5- Close
End the Project. Capture the Knowledge.
Closing is something most teams do poorly. Their sprint ends, the deliverable ships, their team moves onto the next client before it occurs to anyone that they should capture the lessons learned. Proper Closing is when client accepts (and we close against their conditions of satisfaction, triggering final invoice), we reconcile costs and margins between actual and plan, we capture lessons learned in one place and ensure our teams all agree that the engagement is over before our next start up starts up.
According to PMI, 12% of project investment is lost due to poor performance annually. A significant portion of that loss
comes from estimation errors that repeat because the Close phase never captured what went wrong the first time.
How Do the Agile Phases Connect to Scrum and Kanban in Practice?
The five agile stages are the macro levels. The Scrum and Kanban are the micro rhythm within each stage. Within a sprint in Scrum you have one Explore and a retrospective marks your Adapt period.
A 10x two-weekly sprint project goes through 10x Explore and Adopt cycles before it moves to Close.
Kanban cycles in continuous Explore delivery and an Adapt gets triggered by metrics not a phase, cycle time or utilization of your working-in-progress. In reality the majority of large organizations mix methodologies, utilizing agile stages to represent their program and team(s) while utilizing traditional milestone-based reporting for billing and governing projects.
What Is the Difference Between Agile Phases and Traditional Waterfall Phases?
Waterfall phases assume all requirements can be known upfront. Agile phases assume the opposite. For enterprise
organisations, the most effective approach combines agile phases for iterative delivery with waterfall-style milestones
for client billing, compliance checkpoints, and governance sign-offs.
How Does Kytes Support Every Agile Phase for Enterprise Teams?
During our client engagements with EPC, IT Services, Pharma, and the GCC based customers, the breakdown point never changes; when delivery impacts finance. Kytes is an intelligent PSA and Agile project management tool that helps Bridge this divide through the various stages. When sprints end, Kytes ensures invoices start!
Envision
Kytes’ links initiating the project back to the proposal/estimation workflow. It records the initial scope/budget/conditions of satisfaction in the same tool that we will use to record delivery. Instead of determining what the financial baseline should be from memory post-facto, we determine it at Envision:
Speculate
Agile planning software is included in Kytes-you can define your product backlog, configure sprint layout and plan release with real resource cost rates embedded. In Speculate where a plan calls for twelve people in eight sprints Kytes displays your total cost and margin before sprint one.
Explore
The Kytes sprint board, backlog, velocity management and daily standup functions can be related to time entry system; when team member finishes the task on sprint, it can affect cost position and billable inventory automatically once the timesheet entry was approved by someone else. Then, we can bill the Monday completion sprint by Wednesday.
Adapt
Your PMO dashboard provides a single view of every active project and all metrics for overall sprint health, resource utilization, billing status and the margin position. When Adapt highlights a project for margin compression it highlights it in terms of the exact cause.
Close
When any Kytes Project is closed all financial data associated will also close out — plan vs. Actual cost, plan vs. Actual margin, event timing of billing — and this is available to inform planning for new similar projects.
Frequently Asked Questions
