Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

by Jim Highsmith

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780321659170
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	07/10/2009
Series:	Agile Software Development Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	364,915
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Jim Highsmith directs Cutter Consortium’s agile consulting practice. He has over 30 years experience as an IT manager, product manager, project manager, consultant, and software developer. Jim is the author of Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products, Addison Wesley 2004; Adaptive Software Development: A Collaborative Approach to Managing Complex Systems, Dorset House 2000 and winner of the prestigious Jolt Award, and Agile Software Development Ecosystems, Addison Wesley 2002. Jim is the recipient of the 2005 international Stevens Award for outstanding contributions to systems development.

He is also co-editor, with Alistair Cockburn, of the Agile Software Development Series of books from Addison Wesley. Jim is a coauthor of the Agile Manifesto, a founding member of The Agile Alliance, coauthor of the Declaration Interdependence for project leaders, and cofounder and first president of the Agile Project Leadership Network. A frequent speaker at conferences worldwide, Jim has published dozens of articles in major industry publications.

Jim has consulted with IT and product development organizations and software companies in the U.S., Europe, Canada, South Africa, Australia, Japan, India, and New Zealand to help them adapt to the accelerated pace of development in increasingly complex, uncertain environments. Jim’s areas of consulting include the areas of Agile Software Development, Project Management, and Collaboration. He has held technical and management positions with software, computer hardware, banking, and energy companies. Jim holds a B.S. in electrical engineering and an M.S. in management.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Conventions 2

The Agile Software Development Series 2

Chapter 1: The Agile Revolution 5

Agile Business Objectives 10

Continuous Innovation 10

Product Adaptability 10

Improved Time-to-Market 11

People and Process Adaptability 11

Reliable Results 12

Agility Defined 12

Agile Leadership Values 14

Agile Performance Measurement 19

The APM Framework 21

Performance Possibilities 22

Final Thoughts 25

Chapter 2: Value over Constraints 27

Continuous Flow of Customer Value 28

Innovation 30

Execution 32

Lean Thinking 33

Iterative, Feature-Based Delivery 34

Technical Excellence 37

Simplicity 40

Generative Rules 40

Barely Sufficient Methodology 42

Delivery versus Compliance 43

Final Thoughts 45

Chapter 3: Teams over Tasks 47

Leading Teams 47

Building Self-Organizing (Self-Disciplined) Teams 51

Get the Right People 52

Insist on Accountability 53

Foster Self-Discipline 54

Encourage Collaboration 55

Participatory Decision Making 56

Shared Space 58

Customer Collaboration 59

No More Self-Organizing Teams? 60

Final Thoughts 61

Chapter 4: Adapting over Conforming 63

The Science of Adaptation 65

Exploring 68

Responding to Change 70

Product, Process, People 71

Barriers or Opportunities 72

Reliable, Not Repeatable 73

Reflection and Retrospective 75

Principles to Practices 75

Final Thoughts 76

Chapter 5: An Agile Project Management Model 77

An Agile Enterprise Framework 78

Portfolio Governance Layer 78

Project Management Layer 79

Iteration Management Layer 80

Technical Practices Layer 80

An Agile Delivery Framework 80

Phase: Envision 83

Phase: Speculate 83

Phase: Explore 84

Phase: Adapt 84

Phase: Close 85

Not a Complete Product Lifecycle 85

Selecting and Integrating Practices 86

Judgment Required 87

Project Size 88

An Expanded Agile Delivery Framework 88

Final Thoughts 89

Chapter 6: The Envision Phase 91

A Releasable Product 93

Envisioning Practices 94

Product Vision 96

Product Architecture 101

Guiding Principles 104

Project Objectives and Constraints 105

Project Data Sheet 105

Tradeoff Matrix 108

Exploration Factor 109

Project Community 112

Participant Identification 115

Product Team—Development Team Interaction 118

Delivery Approach 122

Self-Organization Strategy 123

Process Framework Tailoring 124

Practice Selection and Tailoring 125

Final Thoughts 127

Chapter 7: The Speculate Phase 129

Speculating on Product and Project 130

Product Backlog 133

What Is a Feature, a Story? 134

The Focus of Stories 135

Story Cards 137

Creating a Backlog 140

Release Planning 142

Scope Evolution 144

Iteration 0 147

Iterations 1-N 148

First Feasible Deployment 152

Estimating 153

Other Card Types 155

Final Thoughts 156

Chapter 8: Advanced Release Planning 157

Release (Project) Planning 157

Wish-based Planning (Balancing Capacity and Demand) 159

Multi-Level Planning 161

A Complete Product Planning Structure 163

Capabilities 166

Capability Cases 167

Creating a Product Backlog and Roadmap 168

An Optimum Planning Structure 169

Value Point Analysis 171

Value Point Determination: Roles and Timing 173

Calculating Relative Value Points 174

Calculating Monetary Value Points 176

Non-Customer-Facing Stories 177

Value and Priority 177

Release Planning Topics 178

Planning Themes and Priorities 179

Increasing Productivity 181

Risk Analysis and Mitigation 182

Planning and Scanning 186

Timeboxed Sizing 188

Other Story Types 190

Work-in-Process versus Throughput 194

Emerging Practices 197

Kanban 197

Consolidated Development 198

Hyper-development and Release 200

Final Thoughts 201

Chapter 9: The Explore Phase 203

Agile Project Leadership 205

Iteration Planning and Monitoring 206

Iteration Planning 206

Workload Management 212

Monitoring Iteration Progress 213

Technical Practices 215

Technical Debt 216

Simple Design 218

Continuous Integration 220

Ruthless Automated Testing 222

Opportunistic Refactoring 223

Coaching and Team Development 225

Focusing the Team 227

Molding a Group of Individuals into a Team 228

Developing the Individual’s Capabilities 232

Moving Rocks, Hauling Water 233

Coaching the Customers 233

Orchestrating Team Rhythm 235

Participatory Decision Making 236

Decision Framing 238

Decision Making 240

Decision Retrospection 244

Leadership and Decision Making 245

Set- and Delay-Based Decision Making 246

Collaboration and Coordination 248

Daily Stand-Up Meetings 248

Daily Interaction with the Product Team 250

Stakeholder Coordination 251

Final Thoughts 251

Chapter 10: The Adapt and Close Phases 253

Adapt 254

Product, Project, and Team Review and Adaptive Action 256

Customer Focus Groups 256

Technical Reviews 259

Team Performance Evaluations 259

Project Status Reports 261

Adaptive Action 268

Close 268

Final Thoughts 270

Chapter 11: Scaling Agile Projects 271

The Scaling Challenge 272

Scaling Factors 273

Up and Out 275

Uncertainty and Complexity 276

An Agile Scaling Model 276

Building Large Agile Teams 278

Organizational Design 279

Collaboration/Coordination Design 281

Decision-Making Design 284

Knowledge Sharing and Documentation 287

Self-Organizing Teams of Teams 291

Team Self-Discipline 293

Process Discipline 294

Scaling Up–Agile Practices 294

Product Architecture 295

Roadmaps and Backlogs 296

Multi-level Release Plans 297

Maintaining Releasable Products 298

Inter-team Commitment Stories 299

Tools 302

Scaling Out–Distributed Projects 302

Final Thoughts 304

Chapter 12: Governing Agile Projects 307

Portfolio Governance 308

Investment and Risk 309

Executive-Level Information Requirements 311

Engineering-Level Information Generation 313

An Enterprise-Level Governance Model 316

Using the Agile Governance Model 320

Portfolio Management Topics 321

Designing an Agile Portfolio 321

Agile Methodology “Fit” 323

Final Thoughts 325

Chapter 13: Beyond Scope, Schedule, and Cost: Measuring Agile Performance 327

What Is Quality? 329

Planning and Measuring 333

Adaptive Performance–Outcomes and Outputs 335

Measurement Issues 336

Measurement Concepts 339

Beyond Budgeting 339

Measuring Performance in Organizations 342

Outcome Performance Metrics 346

Constraints 347

Community Responsibility 348

Improving Decision Making 349

Planning as a Guide 350

Output Performance Metrics 351

Five Core Metrics 351

Outcomes and Outputs 354

Shortening the Tail 355

Final Thoughts 357

Chapter 14: Reliable Innovation 359

The Changing Face of New Product Development 360

Agile People and Processes Deliver Agile Products 362

Reliable Innovation 364

The Value-Adding Project Leader 366

Final Thoughts 367

Bibliography 369

Index 379

TOC, 9780321658395, 6/18/09

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

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