"In this book I argue that any leader can begin the journey for their organization toward agility, even if the entire organization is operating in a traditional, sequential, waterfall approach to delivery of new products and services. I assert that the move from command and control management to servant leadership and trusting people is tantamount to the shift from the fields to the factories in the Industrial Revolution. I stress that the most important thing you can do as a leader to move your organization forward is to encourage your people to apply the underlying values, principles and purposes of what has become known as agile"--Page 2
Projects in the near future will be managed with a hybrid of Agile and traditional waterfall processes to better address the speed to market, product innovation, and financial challenges that organizations face. The project managers who learn how to merge Agile with Waterfall methodologies first will gain a huge career advantage over those who lag behind. This engaging and highly instructive guide covers what Agile is, and how and when it is appropriate to blend it into your projects. Agile Practices for Waterfall Projects will help new and experienced project managers, stakeholders, and students of the discipline to proactively prepare for and ensure their future success. This valuable resource also contains all the terms and concepts needed for those planning to take the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)® exam.
Agile has the power to transform work--but only if it's implemented the right way. For decades business leaders have been painfully aware of a huge chasm: They aspire to create nimble, flexible enterprises. But their day-to-day reality is silos, sluggish processes, and stalled innovation. Today, agile is hailed as the essential bridge across this chasm, with the potential to transform a company and catapult it to the head of the pack. Not so fast. In this clear-eyed, indispensable book, Bain & Company thought leader Darrell Rigby and his colleagues Sarah Elk and Steve Berez provide a much-needed reality check. They dispel the myths and misconceptions that have accompanied agile's rise to prominence--the idea that it can reshape an organization all at once, for instance, or that it should be used in every function and for all types of work. They illustrate that agile teams can indeed be powerful, making people's jobs more rewarding and turbocharging innovation, but such results are possible only if the method is fully understood and implemented the right way. The key, they argue, is balance. Every organization must optimize and tightly control some of its operations, and at the same time innovate. Agile, done well, enables vigorous innovation without sacrificing the efficiency and reliability essential to traditional operations. The authors break down how agile really works, show what not to do, and explain the crucial importance of scaling agile properly in order to reap its full benefit. They then lay out a road map for leading the transition to a truly agile enterprise. Agile isn't a goal in itself; it's a means to becoming a high-performance operation. Doing Agile Right is a must-have guide for any company trying to make the transition--or trying to sustain high agility.
Many books discuss Agile from a theoretical or academic perspective. Becoming Agile takes a different approach and focuses on explaining Agile from a case-study perspective. Agile principles are discussed, explained, and then demonstrated in the context of a case study that flows throughout the book. The case study is based on a mixture of the author's real-world experiences. Becoming Agile also focuses on the importance of adapting Agile principles to the realities of your environment. In the early days of Agile, there was a general belief that Agile had to be used in all phases of a project, and that it had to be used in its purest form. Over the last few years, reputable Agile authorities have begun questioning this belief: We're finding that the best deployments of Agile are customized to the realities of a given company. Becoming Agile discusses the cultural realities of deploying Agile and how to deal with the needs of executives, managers, and the development team during migration. The author discusses employee motivation and establishing incentives that reward support of Agile techniques. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book. Praise for Becoming Agile... "This is much more than just a book about Agile. This is a roadmap. A very detailed roadmap that takes you from the initial "is Agile right for me?" stage through completion and delivery of your pilot project and beyond." -Charlie Griefer, Senior Software Engineer, Amcom Technology "...a must read for those of us who have come from years of waterfall and attempts at changes to "traditional" methodologies or processes... clear, concise and has plenty of example scenarios that many individuals and corporations would identify with." -Jamie Phillips, Senior Software Engineer, Picis Inc "This book is quite unique. It is written in a form of a 5-day training course. I am usually not a fan of such a writing style, but I think that Becoming Agile is an exception. It's about a software process and as such requires a lot of case studies, group exercises (or at least what a book format allows), and therefore the training course style is perfect to facilitate learning." -Vladimir Pasman, Cocoacast.com "Becoming Agile in an Imperfect World offers a different and useful look at Agile methods. Reminding us that becoming agile is more of a mindset adjustment than a process change, Sidky and Smith use a case study to share their insights and tools throughout the book, including the unique Sidky Agile Measurement Index (SAMI)." -Sanjiv Augustine, President, LitheSpeed LLC and author of Managing Agile Projects "The authors emphasise that the aim should be to create a customised agile development process that is tailored to the needs of the organisation...Instead of aiming for "agile perfection", one should aim at reaching the right level of agility for one's organisation. Excellent advice!" -Kailash Awati, Eight to Late "The book totally inspired me. A lot of my readings on Agile from back in the day were very theoretical and high level at the same time. But Becoming Agile helps take you to the next level by going beyond the theory and into the nitty gritty practicality of employing the Agile approach. So it was very energizing having the game plan laid out in front of you, as well as the hurdles you'll encounter and how to overcome them." -Tariq Ahmed, author of Flex 3 in Action
This book is a practical guide for new agile practitioners and contains everything a new project manager needs to know to get up to speed with agile practices quickly and sort out the hype and dogma of pseudo-agile practices.The author lays out the general guidelines for running an agile project with the assumption that the project team may be working in a traditional environment (using the waterfall model, or something similar). Agile Development in the Real World conveys valuable insights to multiple audiences: For new-to-agile project managers, this book provides a distinctive approach that Alan Cline has used with great success, while showing the decision points and perspectives as the agile project moves forward from one step to the next. This allows new agile project managers or agile coaches to choose between the benefits of agile and the benefits of other methods. For the agile technical team member, this book contains templates and sample project artifacts to assist in learning agile techniques and to be used as exemplars for the new practitioner’s own project. For the Project Management Office (PMO), the first three chapters focus on portfolio management. They explain, for the agilists’ benefit, how projects are selected and approved, and why projects have an inherent "shelf-life" that results in hard deadlines that may seem arbitrary to traditional technical teams. What You Will Learn: How and why the evolution of project management, from PM-1 (prescriptive) to PM-2 (adaptive) affects modern 21st century project management. How sociology (stakeholder management), psychology (team dynamics), and anthropology (organizational culture) affect the way software is developed today, and why it is far more effective A clear delineation of what must to be accomplished by all the roles (PM, BA, APM, Developer, and Tester), why those roles are needed, and what they must do Step-by-step guide for a successful project based on studies and the author’s own experiences. Specific techniques for each role on the development team, both in the pre-iteration and iteration cycles, of product development. The appendices contain templates that the team could use or modify to tailor their own agile processes specific to the team, project, and organization.
Break the Old, Waterfall Habits that Hinder Agile Success: Drive Rapid Value and Continuous Improvement When agile teams don't get immediate results, it's tempting for them to fall back into old habits that make success even less likely. In Being Agile, Leslie Ekas and Scott Will present eleven powerful techniques for rapidly gaining substantial value from agile, making agile methods stick, and launching a "virtuous circle" of continuous improvement. Drawing on their experience helping more than 100 teams transition to agile, the authors review its key principles, identify corresponding practices, and offer breakthrough approaches for implementing them. Using their techniques, you can break typical waterfall patterns and go beyond merely "doing agile" to actually thinking and being agile. Ekas and Will help you clear away silos, improve stakeholder interaction, eliminate waste and waterfall-style inefficiencies, and lead the agile transition far more successfully. Each of their eleven principles can stand on its own: when you combine them, they become even more valuable. Coverage includes Building "whole teams" that cut across silos and work together throughout a product's lifecycle Engaging product stakeholders earlier and far more effectively Overcoming inefficient "waterations" and "big batch" waterfall thinking Getting past the curse of multi-tasking Eliminating dangerous technical and project debt Repeatedly deploying "release-ready" software in real user environments Delivering what customers really need, not what you think they need Fixing the root causes of problems so they don't recur Learning from experience: mastering continuous improvement Assessing whether you're just "doing agile" or actually "being agile" Being Agile will be indispensable for all software professionals now adopting agi≤ for coaches, managers, engineers, and team members who want to get more value from it and for students discovering it for the first time.
"With Kanban, every minute you spend on a software project can add value for customers. One book can help you achieve this goal: Agile Project Management with Kanban. Author Eric Brechner pioneered Kanban within the Xbox engineering team at Microsoft. Now he shows you exactly how to make it work for your team. Think of this book as {28}Kanban in a box.
As contrary as it sounds, "planning" -- as we traditionally understand the term--can be the worst thing a company can do. Consider that volatile weather events disrupt trusted supply chains, markets, and promised delivery schedules. Ever-shifting geo-political tensions, as well as internal political upheaval within U.S. and global governments, derail long-planned new ventures. Technology failures block opportunities. Competitors suddenly change their product or release date; your team cannot meet the pace of innovations in your market niche, leaving you sidelined. There are myriad ways in the current business environment for a company's well-considered business plans to go awry. Most business schools continue to prepare managers to be effective in stable and predictable environments, conditions that, if they ever existed at all, are long gone. The Agility Shift shows business leaders exactly how to make the radical mindset and strategy shift necessary to create an agile, entrepreneurial organization that can innovate and thrive in complex, ever-changing contexts. As author Pamela Meyer explains, there is much more involved than a reconfiguration of the org chart and job descriptions. It requires relinquishing the illusion of control at the very foundation of most management training and business practice. Despite most leaders' approaches, "Agility is not simply accelerated planning." Unlike many agility books on the market, The Agility Shift provides specific, actionable strategies and tactics for leaders at all levels of the organization to put into practice immediately to improve agility and achieve results.
This book goes beyond the paint by numbers approach, transcending the "how" of project management to the "what" and "why," which is critical for leaders of change. — Dr. Joel B. Carboni, President and Founder, GPM Global and President, IPMA-USA Project Management beyond Waterfall and Agile presents a flexible, universal, and integrated three-dimensional model for managing projects, the Customizable and Adaptable Methodology for Managing ProjectsTM (CAMMPTM ). By tailoring and customizing the model to a specific industry or organization and by adapting it to a function or project classification, this model can be used to manage any project. CAMMPTM can also be used both in a traditional or an Agile environment. CAMMPTM integrates leading concepts on competence, processes, and sustainability. The model’s three dimensions are project lifecycle, project management processes, and, finally, competence, sustainability, and best practices. The book explains how to integrate these dimensions to manage a project across the three dimensions and the project stages. CAMMPTM is a stage-gate process, which is vital for project success. The current state of practice in project management is not sustainable. The root causes of this problem include a lack of standardized processes, missing methods or methodological approaches, and no real organizational system for managing projects. This book introduces a system to address these shortcomings. It focuses on the elements of this system, which is a practical and systematic methodological approach for managing and delivering all types of projects. CAMMPTM integrates the best learning from the various global associations in the field. The book distills the experience and knowledge of a practitioner working in different roles for more than three decades on various types of projects of all sizes and complexities. It is a practical book by a practitioner writing for practitioners.
For those considering Extreme Programming, this book provides no-nonsense advice on agile planning, development, delivery, and management taken from the authors' many years of experience. While plenty of books address the what and why of agile development, very few offer the information users can apply directly.
