What is an Agile Project?
An Agile project is a project that follows one of the methodologies within the Agile umbrella of methodologies and practices. Some of the well known methodologies or practices within Agile include Scrum, Lean, Kanban, Xtreme Programming etc. Each of these essentially forms a tool-kit within the Agile Project Manager's toolset. While some of the tools may be mutually-exclusive, most of the tools can be used in combination with others in order to allow for best results.
Agile projects may have one or more of the following characteristics:
Iterations: Work is planned and done iteratively; the product/service is built iteratively.
Daily or Frequent Touch-points: The term most often used is "stand-up". These are frequent and regular touchpoint to allow team-members to provide updates, highlight risks and issues.
Iteration Demos: Allow team-members to show work completed in the previous iteration and collect feedback and assess actual progress.
Continuous Improvement: The team regularly evaluates its improvement over time and make adjustments in order to continuously improve.
Continous Releases: Agile also leans towards releasing products early and more frequently as opposed to keeping on development for a long time.
Collaborative: The environment within an Agile project is more collaborative.
Team-Focussed: Agile depends a lot on the successful functioning of its teams for its success. The more-wellformed the teams become, the better they can deliver.
Transparency: You'd see a higher level of transparency within a successful Agile execution.
High level of Trust: Last but surely not the least (actually this is at the heart of Agile success), successful Agile teams and projects would show high levels of trust amongst its members.
That's it for now. Please let me know if you think that there is an important point missing in the list.