Agile Project Management

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Agile Project Management
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Agile Manifesto (2001)

• Individuals and interactions over processes and
  tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

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Customer Value

• The right product
• Exactly the features that the customer wants
• The right price
• The price the customer believes is fair
• The right time
• When the customer wants it

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Agility

• Agility is the ability to deliver customer value
  while dealing with inherent project
  unpredictability and dynamism by recognizing and
  adapting to change.

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Agility

• Agility is the capability to balance
• stability with flexibility
• Order with chaos
• Planning with execution
• Optimization with exploration
• Control with speed
• . to deliver customer value reliably in the face
  of uncertainty and change

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Agile Methodologies

• eXtreme Programming (XP)
• Crystal
• Scrum
• Feature-Driven Development (FDD)

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Agile Methodologies Basics

• Small releases
• Iterative and incremental development
• Collocation (workcells, teamrooms)
• Release plan/feature backlog (release planning
  game)
• Iteration plan/feature backlog (iteration
  planning game)
• Self organizing teams
• Pairing (specific to XP)
• Test-driven development
• Tracking
• Simple, lean and adaptable

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Agile Project Management

• Agile Project Management is the work of
  energizing, empowering and enabling project teams
  to rapidly and reliably deliver business value by
  engaging customers and continuously learning and
  adapting to their changing needs and environments
• APM sees projects as organic Complex Adaptive
  Systems (CAS)

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APM Principles

• Foster alignment and cooperation
• People are primary agents driving value, change,
  learning and adaption
• Shared vision keeps people aligned
• When people are in alignment they cooperate in
  stead of compete

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APM Principles

• Encourage emergence and self-organizing teams
• Minimal, simple processes and practices
• Optimal structure (self-organized) emerge from
  close interactions between many people following
  simple rules

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APM Principles

• Institute learning and adaption
• Feedback is used for continuous learning,
  adaption and improvement
• Projects operate on their chaordic edge the
  edge between chaos and order

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APM Practices

• Organic team
• Guiding vision
• Simple rules
• Open information
• Light touch
• Adaptive leadership

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Organic teams

• Enabling connections and adaption through close
  relationships on small flexible teams
• Redundancy function
• Generalizing specialists
• Small teamsizes gt optimal communication channels

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Guiding vision

• Keeping the team aligned and directed with a
  shared mental model
• A mental model is a mechanism for anticipation
  and adaption
• PMs maintain a good enough vision, which
  serves as the mental model

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Simple rules

• Establishing a set of simple, generative process
  rules for the team
• E.g. XP practices
• Stated and agreed upon at the outset
• Changed if needed during the project

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Open Information

• Providing free and open access to information
• Obstacles to information exchange caused by
  organization silos are identified and removed

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Light Touch

• Applying intelligent control to foster emergent
  order and maximal value
• Increased control does not automaticcaly decrease
  uncertainty and increase order and value
• Courage! You cant know everything in advance

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Adaptive Leadership

• Steering the project by continuously monitoring,
  learning and adapting
• Continually observing and assessing practices,
  analyzing and adapting them for desired results
  and implementing them with maximum impact