The major differences between Agile and Traditional Project Management

Agile projects focus on embracing change through adaptive action. Responding to change over following a plan is an important Agile Manifesto principle. Traditional projects rely on corrective action to control change.

Progressive elaboration is part of the traditional projects requiring heavy up-front planning. Agile projects focus on incremental planning to address minimally marketable feature adding value.

Agile projects use time-boxing with a predefined iteration to deliver customer prioritized features. Traditonal projects rely on manager negotiated scope based delivery.

Traditional project management relies on top-down control. Agile projects depend on collaboration from self disciplined and self-organized teams.

Agile Projects focus heavily on customer satisfaction and interaction. This is different from traditional projects that focus on plans and artifacts.

Agile relies on individuals and interactions over processes and tools emphasizing team work and shared ownership of code. This differs from heavy weight processes in traditional project management.

Agile projects benefit from value based metrics that measure progress at the iteration level instead of at the project level. Many traditional project metrics do extend in agile projects, however.

Agile Manifesto recommends having enough documentation to carry forward to meet Agility. Working software is critical than exhaustive documentation.

Traditional projects focus on managing tasks in the work breakdown structure. Agile projects manage team's commitment to the product's vision delivering on features.