Product Description

Best practices for managing projects in agile environments—now updated with new techniques for larger projects

Today, the pace of project management moves faster. Project management needs to become more flexible and far more responsive to customers. Using Agile Project Management (APM), project managers can achieve all these goals without compromising value, quality, or business discipline. In Agile Project Management, Second Edition, renowned agile pioneer Jim Highsmith thoroughly updates his classic guide to APM, extending and refining it to support even the largest projects and organizations.

 

Writing for project leaders, managers, and executives at all levels, Highsmith integrates the best project management, product management, and software development practices into an overall framework designed to support unprecedented speed and mobility. The many topics added in this new edition include incorporating agile values, scaling agile projects, release planning, portfolio governance, and enhancing organizational agility. Project and business leaders will especially appreciate Highsmith’s new coverage of promoting agility through performance measurements based on value, quality, and constraints.

 

This edition’s coverage includes:

• Understanding the agile revolution’s impact on product development
• Recognizing when agile methods will work in project management, and when they won’t
• Setting realistic business objectives for Agile Project Management
•  Promoting agile values and principles across the organization
• Utilizing a proven Agile Enterprise Framework that encompasses governance, project and iteration management, and technical practices
• Optimizing all five stages of the agile project: Envision, Speculate, Explore, Adapt, and Close
• Organizational and product-related processes for scaling agile to the largest projects and teams
• Agile project governance solutions for executives and management
•  The “Agile Triangle”: measuring performance in ways that encourage agility instead of discouraging it
• The changing role of the agile project leader

 

 

 

 

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #118137 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 312 pages

From the Back Cover

“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

Now, 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

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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

The essence of this movement, whether in new product development, new service offerings, software applications, or project management, rests on two foundational goals: delivering innovative products to customers (particularly in highly uncertain situations) 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 may have declined from prodigious to merely lofty, innovation in areas such as biotechnology and nanotechnology is 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 to the innovation process, 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. When it takes a pharmaceutical company months to develop a chemical compound and test it, errors are costly and careful laboratory design becomes the norm. When combinatorial chemistry can create hundreds, if not thousands, of compounds in a day and sophisticated instruments can test them in a few more days, careful specification and design can be less effective and more costly than careful experimentation. This same 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 and organizational processes are required. Even when these technologies and processes are lower cost and higher performance than their predecessors, the transformation often proves difficult.

Experimentation matters, as the title of Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke's recent book exclaims (Thomke 2003), but many project managers are still mired in a prescriptive, conformance-to-plan mentality that eschews that very experimentation.

Project management, at least that sector of project management dealing with new product development, needs to be transformed, but to what? It needs to be transformed to move faster, be more flexible, and be aggressively customer responsive. Agile Project Management (APM) and agile product development answer this transformational need. APM brings together a set of principles and practices that enables project managers to catch up with the realities of modern product development.

The target audience for this book is project managers, those hearty individuals who shepherd teams through the exciting but often messy process of turning visions into products—be they cell phones or medical electronic instruments. APM rejects the view of project managers 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. Agile project managers focus on products and people, not paperwork.

There are four broad topics covered in Agile Project Management: opportunity, principles, framework, 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 principles of APM revolve around creating both adaptive products that are easy and less expensive to change and adaptive project teams that can respond rapidly to changes in their project's ecosystem. The framework is a set of high-level processes, or phases—Envision, Speculate, Explore, Adapt, and Close—that support exploration and experimentation and deliver results reliably, even in the face of constant change, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Finally, the practices—from developing a product vision box to getting the right people —provide actionable ways in which project teams can deliver results.

At its core, APM focuses on customers, products, and people—delivering value to customers, building adaptable products, and engaging talented people in collaborative work.

Jim Highsmith
January 2004
Flagstaff, Arizona

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Customer Reviews

A wonderful book full of immediately practical advice
This is a wonderful and highly practical book. Within hours of putting it down I was already putting some of its advice into practice. A highly thought-provoking book, arguing, for instance, that agility is more attitude than process and more environment than methodology. Because of the complexity of today's software projects, one new product development project can rarely be viewed as a repeat of a prior project. This makes Highsmith's advice to favor a reliable process over a repeatable one particularly timely and important.

Interwoven into the book is a dialog between two project managers, one an agile development manager and the other a more traditional manager. Their conversations start each chapter and do an excellent job of introducing the main ideas of the chapter. Unlike many other agile books, the advice in this book can be applied to teams that are dipping their toes into agile waters or that are already fully immersed. Highsmith's writing, full of both wisdom and anecdotes, is both informative and fun. This book is a pleasure to read. More importantly, though, you will leave this book with some very specific practices you can immediately apply to your projects.

Experience, knowledge, wisdom and structure together
The most striking aspect of this book is its content of technical wisdom. It is not only an analytical produce; much more than that it seems to be the voice of a very rich experience in product development.

The agile approach is not a set of specific tools and techniques but an extremely effective strategy to use a carefully selected subset of them based on a powerful set of guiding principles.

The responsibility of managing the development of a new product suddenly fell upon me, and Jim Highsmith's book has given me abundant guidance and pointed at all right directions to face happily and confidently this new challenge. Besides leading us to review and improve all previous practices.

If you have only heard of the agile approach and want to know what is it about -which was my case- this book fulfils the expectations generously. And if you already have a good notion of APM, I believe that the orderly, deep and complete presentation of the subjects will definitely help to refresh the knowledge.

And if you are in the software development business and just want to do your job better, forget the name `agile' and read it. It explains valuable concepts such as exploration factor, technical debt, first feasible deployment, anticipation, adaptivity, opportunistic refactoring that are universally valuable.

It is most definitely a 5-star piece of literature.

Good on principles, but practices could be more dev-related
This book is a thoroughly enjoyable read, from the emphasis on principles, the excellent job navigating the difficult territory of the line between prescribed process and anarchy, and the stages a team goes through as it embraces an agile style of development. I even thought that the hypothetical story added a nice element of repetition to each section that helped drive home the main points.

The one thing I would've liked was for this book to get off the fence and decide to be software-related. Almost every example is software related (except for the basketball analogy that got beaten to death...), but it goes out of the way not to specify software practices because this is about arbitrary project management. The book's in the "Agile Software Development Series" and the author is primarily a software consultant. I'd prefer it stuck to software rather than trying to go for broader appeal because there were several practice areas where detail was elided on that basis and could've really helped make the practices more concrete.

Also, it would've been nice to have a little grid mapping up common-day software development methodologies like Scrum, XP, FDD, and DSDM against the practices in the book. I tried to do it in my head, but once you get past 5x5, it's something that should've been provided.