Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

by Jim Highsmith

Overview

Please note - there is now a second edition of this book available, with the ISBN of 0321658396.

“Jim Highsmith is one of a few modern writers who are helping us understand the new nature of work in the knowledge economy.”

—Rob Austin, Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School

“This is the project management book we’ve all been waiting for—the book that effectively combines Agile methods and rigorous project management. Not only does this book help us make sense of project management in this current world of iterative, incremental Agile methods, but it’s an all-around good read!”

—Lynne Ellen, Sr. VP & CIO, DTE Energy

“Finally a book that reconciles the passion of the Agile Software movement with the needed disciplines of project management. Jim’s book has provided a service to all of us.”

—Neville R(oy) Singham, CEO, ThoughtWorks, Inc.

“The world of product development is becoming more dynamic and uncertain. Many managers cope by reinforcing processes, adding documentation, or further honing costs. This isn’t working. Highsmith brilliantly guides us into an alternative that fits the times.”

—Preston G. Smith, principal, New Product Dynamics/coauthor, Developing Products in Half the Time

One of the field’s leading experts brings together all the knowledge and resources you need to use APM in your next project. Jim Highsmith shows why APM should be in every manager’s toolkit, thoroughly addressing the questions project managers raise about Agile approaches. He systematically introduces the five-phase APM framework, then presents specific, proven tools for every project participant. Coverage includes:

• Six principles of Agile Project Management
• How to capitalize on emerging new product development technologies
• Putting customers at the center of your project, where they belong
• Creating adaptive teams that respond quickly to changes in your project’s “ecosystem”
• Which projects will benefit from APM—and which won’t
• APM’s five phases: Envision, Speculate, Explore, Adapt, Close
• APM practices, including the Product Vision Box and Project Data Sheet
• Leveraging your PMI skills in Agile environments
• Scaling APM to larger projects and teams
• For every project manager, team leader, and team member

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780321630025
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	04/06/2004
Series:	Agile Software Development Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

JIM HIGHSMITH is Director, Agile Project Management Practice, and Fellow, Business Technology Council at Cutter Consortium. He is also a Member of the Software Development Productivity Council, Flashline, Inc. Highsmith authored Adaptive Software Development, which won the prestigious Jolt award for excellence, and Agile Software Development Ecosystems (Addison Wesley). A recognized leader in the Agile movement, he co-authored the Agile Manifesto and co-founded the Agile Alliance.

Read an Excerpt

PrefacePreface

When the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (http://www.agilealliance.org) was written in spring 2001, it launched a movement—a movement that raced through the software development community; generated controversy and debate; connected with related movements in manufacturing, construction, and aerospace; and extended into project management.

The impetus for this second edition of Agile Project Management comes from three sources—the maturing of the agile movement over the last five years, the trend to large agile projects, and the formation of a project management organization for agile leaders (the Agile Project Leadership Network).

The essence of this agile movement, whether in new product development, new service offerings, software applications, or project management, rests on two foundational goals: delivering valuable products to customers and creating working environments in which people look forward to coming to work each day.

Innovation continues to drive economic success for countries, industries, and individual companies. While the rates of innovation in information technology in the last decade might have declined from prodigious to merely lofty, innovation in areas such as biotechnology and nanotechnology are picking up any slack.

New technologies such as combinatorial chemistry and sophisticated computer simulation are fundamentally altering the innovation process itself. When these technologies are applied, the cost of iteration can be driven down dramatically, enabling exploratory and experimental processes to be both more effective and less costly than serial, specification-based processes. This dynamic is at work in the automotive, integrated circuit, software, and pharmaceutical industries. It will soon be at work in your industry.

But taking advantage of these new innovation technologies has proved tricky. When exploration processes replace prescriptive processes, people have to change. For the chemist who now manages the experimental compounding process rather than designing compounds himself, and the manager who has to deal with hundreds of experiments rather than a detailed, prescriptive plan, new project management processes are required. Even when these technologies and processes are lower cost and higher performance than their predecessors, the transformation often proves difficult.

Project management needs to be transformed to move faster, be more flexible, and be aggressively customer responsive. Agile Project Management (APM) answers this transformational need. It brings together a set of principles and practices that enable project managers to catch up with the realities of modern product development.

The target audience for this book is leaders, those hearty individuals who shepherd teams through the exciting but often messy process of turning visions into products—be they software, cell phones, or medical instruments. Leaders arise at many levels—project, team, executive, management—and APM addresses each of these, although the target audience continues to be project leaders. APM rejects the view of project leaders as functionaries who merely comply with the bureaucratic demands of schedules and budgets and replaces it with one in which they are intimately involved in helping teams deliver products.

There are four broad topics covered in Agile Project Management: opportunity, values, frameworks, and practices. The opportunity lies in creating innovative products and services—things that are new, different, and creative. These are products that can’t be defined completely in the beginning but evolve over time through experimentation, exploration, and adaptation.

The APM values focus helps create products that deliver customer value today and are responsive to future customer needs. The frameworks include both enterprise and project levels, with phases of Envision, Speculate, Explore, Adapt, Close that deliver results reliably, even in the face of constant change, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Finally, the practices—from developing a product vision box to participatory decision making—provide actionable ways in which teams deliver results.

In this second edition of APM the four major new or updated topics are: agile values, scaling agile projects, advanced release planning, and organizational agility. Chapters 2-4 have been rewritten around three summarizing value statements—delivering value over meeting constraints, leading the team over managing tasks, and adapting to change over conforming to plans. The scaling agile chapter has been completely revised to reflect the last five years of experience. A new chapter on release planning has been added to encourage teams to place more attention on release planning. Finally, chapters on the organizational topics of project governance and changing performance measurement systems have been added.

In the long run, probably the most important addition is the new perspective on performance measurement. We ask teams to be agile, and then measure their performance by strict adherence to the Iron Triangle—scope, schedule, budget. This edition of APM proposes a new triangle—an Agile Triangle that consists of Value, Quality, and Constraints. If we want to grow agile organizations then our performance measurement system must encourage agility.

Jim Highsmith July 2009
Flagstaff, Arizona

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Preface.


Introduction.


1. The Agile Revolution.

Innovative Product Development.

Reliable Innovation.

Continuous Innovation.

Product Adaptability.

Reduced Delivery Schedules.

People and Process Adaptability.

Reliable Results.

Core Agile Values.

Responding to Change.

Working Products.

Customer Collaboration.

Individuals and Interactions.

Agile Project Management.

Agility Defined.

The APM Framework.

Thriving in a Chaordic World.

Our Journey.

2. Guiding Principles: Customers and Products.

Herman and Maya.

The Guiding Principles of Agile Project Management.

Deliver Customer Value.

Innovation and Adaptability.

Planning and Control to Execution.

Delivery versus Compliance.

Employ Iterative, Feature-Based Delivery.

Creating a Better Product.

Producing Earlier Benefits.

Progressive Risk Reduction.

Champion Technical Excellence.

Customers and Products.

3. Guiding Principles: Leadership-Collaboration Management.

Management Style.

The Business of APM.

Reliable, Not Repeatable.

Progress Reporting.

Leadership-Collaboration Management.

Encourage Exploration.

Shared Space.

Encouragement Isn't Enough.

Build Adaptive (Self-Organizing, Self-Disciplined) Teams.

Getting the Right People.

Articulating the Product Vision.

Encouraging Interaction.

Participatory Decision Making.

Insisting on Accountability.

Steering, Not Controlling.

Self-Discipline.

Simplify.

Generative Rules.

Barely Sufficient Methodology.

Principles to Practices.

4. An Agile Project Management Model.

Principles and Practices.

An Agile Process Framework.

Phase: Envision.

Phase: Speculate.

Phase: Explore.

Phase: Adapt.

Phase: Close.

Judgment Required.

Project Size.

Agile Practices.

5. The Envision Phase.

Get the Right People.

Phase: Envision.

Practice: Product Vision Box and Elevator Test Statement.

Objective.

Discussion.

Practice: Product Architecture.

Objective.

Discussion.

Guiding Principles.

Practice: Project Data Sheet.

Objective.

Discussion.

Tradeoff Matrix.

Exploration Factor.

Practice: Get the Right People.

Objective.

Discussion.

Practice: Participant Identification.

Objective.

Discussion.

Practice: Customer Team-Developer Team Interface.

Objective.

Discussion.

Practice: Process and Practice Tailoring.

Objective.

Discussion.

Self-Organization Strategy.

Process Framework Tailoring.

Practice Selection and Tailoring.

Early Planning.

Envision Summary.

6: The Speculate Phase.

Scope Evolution.

Phase: Speculate.

Practice: Product Feature List.

Objective.

Discussion.

Practice: Feature Cards.

Objective.

Discussion.

Practice: Performance Requirements Cards.

Objective.

Discussion.

Practice: Release, Milestone, and Iteration Plan.

Objective.

Discussion.

Iteration 0.

Iterations 1-N.

Next Iteration Plan.

First Feasible Deployment.

Estimating.

Scope Evolution.

Risk Analysis and Mitigation.

Speculate Summary.

7. The Explore Phase.

Individual Performance.

Phase: Explore.

Practice: Workload Management.

Objective.

Discussion.

Practice: Low-Cost Change.

Objective.

Discussion.

Technical Debt.

Simple Design.

Frequent Integration.

Ruthless Testing.

Opportunistic Refactoring.

Practice: Coaching and Team Development.

Objective.

Discussion.

Focusing the Team on Delivering Results.

Molding a Group of Individuals into a Team.

Developing Each Individual's Capabilities.

Providing the Team with Required Resources and Removing Roadblocks.

Coaching the Customers.

Orchestrating Team Rhythm.

Practice: Daily Team Integration Meetings.

Objective.

Discussion.

Practice: Participatory Decision Making.

Objective.

Discussion.

Decision Framing.

Decision Making.

Decision Retrospection.

Leadership and Decision Making.

Set- and Delay-Based Decision Making.

Practice: Daily Interaction with the Customer Team.

Objective.

Discussion.

Stakeholder Coordination.

Explore Summary.

8. The Adapt and Close Phases.

Progress.

Phase: Adapt.

Practice: Product, Project, and Team Review and Adaptive Action.

Objective.

Discussion.

Customer Focus Groups.

Technical Reviews.

Team Performance Evaluations.

Project Status Reports.

Adaptive Action.

Phase: Close.

Adapt and Close Summary.

9. Building Large Adaptive Teams.

An Achilles' Heel?

The Scaling Challenge.

A Scaled Adaptive Framework.

A Hub Organizational Structure.

Self-Organization Extensions.

Team Self-Discipline.

The Commitment-Accountability Protocol.

Is It Working?

Structure and Tools.

Summary.

10. Reliable Innovation.

The Agile Vision.

The Changing Face of New Product Development.

Agile People and Processes Deliver Agile Products.

Implementing the Vision.

Reliable Innovation.

The Value-Adding Project Manager.

Conviction.

Bibliography.


Index.

Preface

Preface Preface

When the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (http://www.agilealliance.org) was written in spring 2001, it launched a movement—a movement that raced through the software development community; generated controversy and debate; connected with related movements in manufacturing, construction, and aerospace; and extended into project management.

The impetus for this second edition of Agile Project Management comes from three sources—the maturing of the agile movement over the last five years, the trend to large agile projects, and the formation of a project management organization for agile leaders (the Agile Project Leadership Network).

The essence of this agile movement, whether in new product development, new service offerings, software applications, or project management, rests on two foundational goals: delivering valuable products to customers and creating working environments in which people look forward to coming to work each day.

Innovation continues to drive economic success for countries, industries, and individual companies. While the rates of innovation in information technology in the last decade might have declined from prodigious to merely lofty, innovation in areas such as biotechnology and nanotechnology are picking up any slack.

New technologies such as combinatorial chemistry and sophisticated computer simulation are fundamentally altering the innovation process itself. When these technologies are applied, the cost of iteration can be driven down dramatically, enabling exploratory and experimental processes to be both more effective and less costly than serial, specification-based processes. This dynamic is at work in the automotive, integrated circuit, software, and pharmaceutical industries. It will soon be at work in your industry.

But taking advantage of these new innovation technologies has proved tricky. When exploration processes replace prescriptive processes, people have to change. For the chemist who now manages the experimental compounding process rather than designing compounds himself, and the manager who has to deal with hundreds of experiments rather than a detailed, prescriptive plan, new project management processes are required. Even when these technologies and processes are lower cost and higher performance than their predecessors, the transformation often proves difficult.

Project management needs to be transformed to move faster, be more flexible, and be aggressively customer responsive. Agile Project Management (APM) answers this transformational need. It brings together a set of principles and practices that enable project managers to catch up with the realities of modern product development.

The target audience for this book is leaders, those hearty individuals who shepherd teams through the exciting but often messy process of turning visions into products—be they software, cell phones, or medical instruments. Leaders arise at many levels—project, team, executive, management—and APM addresses each of these, although the target audience continues to be project leaders. APM rejects the view of project leaders as functionaries who merely comply with the bureaucratic demands of schedules and budgets and replaces it with one in which they are intimately involved in helping teams deliver products.

There are four broad topics covered in Agile Project Management: opportunity, values, frameworks, and practices. The opportunity lies in creating innovative products and services—things that are new, different, and creative. These are products that can’t be defined completely in the beginning but evolve over time through experimentation, exploration, and adaptation.

The APM values focus helps create products that deliver customer value today and are responsive to future customer needs. The frameworks include both enterprise and project levels, with phases of Envision, Speculate, Explore, Adapt, Close that deliver results reliably, even in the face of constant change, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Finally, the practices—from developing a product vision box to participatory decision making—provide actionable ways in which teams deliver results.

In this second edition of APM the four major new or updated topics are: agile values, scaling agile projects, advanced release planning, and organizational agility. Chapters 2-4 have been rewritten around three summarizing value statements—delivering value over meeting constraints, leading the team over managing tasks, and adapting to change over conforming to plans. The scaling agile chapter has been completely revised to reflect the last five years of experience. A new chapter on release planning has been added to encourage teams to place more attention on release planning. Finally, chapters on the organizational topics of project governance and changing performance measurement systems have been added.

In the long run, probably the most important addition is the new perspective on performance measurement. We ask teams to be agile, and then measure their performance by strict adherence to the Iron Triangle—scope, schedule, budget. This edition of APM proposes a new triangle—an Agile Triangle that consists of Value, Quality, and Constraints. If we want to grow agile organizations then our performance measurement system must encourage agility.

Jim Highsmith
July 2009
Flagstaff, Arizona

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.