Project Management the Agile Way, Second Edition

Making it Work in the Enterprise

John Goodpasture

• Publisher: J. Ross Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781604277647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Business

Widely acclaimed as one of the top agile books in its first edition, Project Management the Agile Way has now been updated and redesigned by popular demand. This second edition is in a modular format to facilitate training and advanced course instruction, and provides new coverage of agile, such as hybrid agile methods, the latest public sector practices, and a chapter dedicated to transitioning to agile. It discusses the "grand bargain" between project management and business; the shift in dominance from plans to product and from input to output; and introduces new concepts such as return on benefit. Experienced practitioners and students that want to learn how to make agile work effectively in the enterprise should read this book. Also, individuals preparing for the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)examination, and training providers developing courses, will find this second edition quite helpful.

1

A Quick Read

Agile means getting effective project results even in the swirl of complex and uncertain project requirements, primarily by applying small teams—working collaboratively—to frequently deliver increments of business value with priority according to business effectiveness, importance, and urgency.

“Almost any methodology can be made to work on some project. Any methodology can manage to fail on some project. Heavy processes can be successful. Light processes are more often successful, and more importantly, the people on those projects credit the success to the lightness of the methodology.”

Alistair Cockburn

This chapter is a quick read about management principles for agile projects—guidelines for actions and behaviors. Agile is about delivering business value quickly— quicker than needs change in business and market cycles—and about being adaptive and responsive to evolving customer needs and business circumstances.

Serious and compelling issues have motivated many thought leaders to invest their time, energy, and ingenuity toward developing agile values, principles, and practices. They have worked tirelessly to make them useful, and to promote them to project managers, architects, and developers. Perhaps stimulated by the increasing pace of business (especially since the advent of the Internet and all the allied electronic communication capabilities) and perhaps reacting to the frustration of unsatisfactory project results that seem a victim of misunderstood, unknown, or unknowable requirements, untraditional ideas about how to go about high-technology projects have taken root. All share one objective and that is: To deliver high-quality results that are beneficial to business and customer, even if there is volatility and uncertainty about what the customer needs and wants.¹

An agenda for improving the value proposition for the customer is something that no project manager can ignore, and it is an agenda that every project manager can embrace. Partly, improvement comes with better practices made specific to the project; other improvements come from better application of management regimes.

In all agile methodologies, the voice of the customer—in effect, the voice of the value proposition—is heard more often and heard in close proximity to the work results. Since those who read this book are project and program managers, business analysts, and other functional managers, the discussion that follows will look through the lens of management—specifically project management.

This chapter presents these practices comparatively and provides the Cliffs Notes for managers to size up these ideas for potential application in their projects.

A project management tip

Agile methodologies are a management agenda

The story of agile methods is first a story about management approaches; it is an agenda for a different management framework on which to hang familiar implementation practices Agile is an agenda that places great trust in individuals It is an agenda that trades command and control processes and documentation for real-time face-to-face communication Agile enables managers to direct the maximum portion of project energy and activity towards value-added outcomes, and allows users and end customers a near real-time voice in the specification of value

Module 1: History, Background, and the Manifesto

Seeking a more effective way to deliver on customer and sponsor expectations

Module 1 Objectives

• Familiarize the reader with the motivations that inform agile history
• Inform the reader with the thinking of early agile leaders that led to the Agile Manifesto and the Agile Principles
• Discuss and explain the Agile Manifesto as a call for a shift in dominance of methods and practices
• Discuss and explain the Agile Principles as a modification of the traditional allegiance to plans and process

A Short History Provides Context

The genesis of agile methods was in the product development industry, first in Japan in the 1980s, and more recently in the U.S. software industry. Beset by the confluence of new-to-the-world concepts, software components that were hard to imagine until you saw them, and project cycles that were often longer than business cycles, products were often not meeting expectations. In the face of some unsettling performance, some in the industry set out to think of doing software projects a different way.

Early Thinkers

Some early research into untraditional methods began with two Japanese business research academics who examined product development projects at Honda, as well as at Fuji-Xerox, Cannon, NEC, and Epson in the consumer electronics industry. Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka described their findings in a 1986 Harvard Business Review article, “The New Product Development Game.”²

In that article, they coined the term Scrum to describe the behaviors they observed in the businesses they studied. Scrum is a closely knit team formation in rugby that involves the whole team working as a collective. The objective is to move the ball using tactics that are improvised and self-directed by team members in real time. Although software was not Takeuchi-Nonaka’s focus, much of what they wrote about is similar to what is now embedded in the software methodology known as Scrum.

From his work done in the early 1990s, Jeff Sutherland is credited in the United States with being the early thought leader behind Scrum. Ken Schwaber became a close associate of Sutherland, and together they drove Scrum forward.

Another thought leader with early experience is Dr. Alistair Cockburn. Cockburn, the inspiration behind the agile method known as the Crystal Family, and a prolific writer and thinker in the human and process aspects of software development, had occasion to work with IBM in the early 1990s and to observe the performance of many of IBM’s software teams. He was struck by the fact that many of the most successful projects were rogues, in the process sense. The team participants deliberately avoided the approved IBM processes in favor of their own invention. Although not formalized with a named methodology at the time, one characteristic that was common was developers sitting close together and talking to each other about what they were developing. Moreover, he observed that many of the teams that were following the IBM process were continually unsuccessful.

An early agile experimenter was Kent Beck. In the late 1990s, Chrysler engaged Beck and his associates to help with a new software development for its payroll system. By the time Beck, Ward Cunningham, Ron Jefferies, and Martin Fowler arrived on the scene, the project was in trouble—in spite of trying to follow a formal development plan. Not liking what they found, Beck, et al., redid the project successfully—perhaps the first Extreme Programming (XP) project. As one of the earliest industrial projects to use XP, and, as reported in October 1998 in the publication Distributed Computing, the C3 Team was very complimentary about the favorable results.

Group of 17

Cockburn, Schawber, and Beck were among 17 who, in 2001, gathered in a resort setting in Snowbird, Utah, with a mission to find common ground among competing and untraditional methods.³ Although not a close-knit group at the outset, they were able to put together something they were all seeking: a framework they named the Agile Manifesto, purposed to guide practitioners of various lightweight methods. At that meeting, they also agreed on the name agile as a better representation for what they were promoting. The drafting of the Agile Principles and the founding of the Agile Alliance followed.

Agile Manifesto and Agile Principles Set Up Agile Methods

The Agile Manifesto is a statement of values—of strongly held beliefs—expressed as preferences, not absolutes. Generally, all agile methodologies incorporate the manifesto into their value system, some more than others.

The most important strategic idea is this:

• The manifesto calls for a shift in dominance, priority, and importance from baseline traditional thinking to agile thinking, but not for an outright rejection of the constituents of the traditional methodologies

The Agile Manifesto

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.

Through this work we have come to value:

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

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Source: www.agilemanifesto.org

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools: This first preference is for personal communications—face-to-face where possible—and recognition of the uniqueness of each individual and the cont...