THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT PROFESSION is going through rapid and profound changes due to the widespread influence of Agile:
It is becoming very apparent that the classical plan‐driven approach to project management that has been the predominantly accepted way of doing project management for a long time is no longer the only way to do project management:
Those changes are likely to dramatically change the role of project managers in many environments as we have known them, raise the bar for the entire project management profession, and perhaps even eliminate the role of some Project Managers as we have known them.
From an Agile perspective, there have also been some equally significant changes:
In both of these environments, there is a recognition that well‐defined and prescriptive “cookbook” approaches are no longer effective for dealing with the complexity of these challenges. Instead, there is a need to focus on defining principles that need to be interpreted in the context of a given situation:
The movement to a principles‐based approach in both of these environments will require a lot more judgment and skill for determining and implementing the right approach for a particular project.
It is critical for Project Managers and the Project Management Profession, as a whole, to be proactive, anticipate the most likely impact of these challenges, and adapt accordingly.
It is also important for the Agile community to recognize the need to scale an Agile approach for managing large, complex enterprise‐level projects.
This raises a number of questions including:
Those are the needs and challenges that this book is intended to address. This book should be of value to both project managers and Agile professionals to develop a more integrated approach.
The following is a summary of what I believe are the most important steps in the journey toward becoming an Agile Project Manager (not necessarily in this order):
I have successfully developed an online training curriculum in Agile Project Management that is currently offered on three different platforms with over 175,000 students. Anyone who has taken any of those courses should see a lot of similarity between the material in this book and the material in my online Agile Project Management training courses.
Many of the current trends that are going on in the project management community now have validated the original direction of the book when it was originally published in 2015. As a result, the changes required in the second edition are not radical. Here’s a summary of the most important areas of change:
Agile Project Management is an art that will take time for anyone to develop and master. There's a concept from martial arts called shu‐ha‐ri that is very appropriate here. It outlines the stages of proficiency someone goes through to develop mastery of martial arts techniques. The same concept can be applied to Agile Project Management:
The way the book is organized follows the shu‐ha‐ri approach to learning. The initial chapters of the book start out with a very basic understanding of the “mechanics” of Agile and learning how to do it “by the book.” That is equivalent to the “shu” level of training.
The book will go deeper into the principles behind Agile and why they make sense. It is essential to understand the principles at a deeper level before moving on to the “ha” level and know how to customize an approach to fit a given situation.
The final goal is to move to the master level or “ri” level where you will learn to go beyond current ways of implementing both Agile and plan‐driven project management approaches and learn how to blend them together as needed to fit a given project and business environment. That goal will come from actual practice in implementing these ideas in real world situations; however, it is hoped that the information in this book and the case studies that are included will help Project Managers move rapidly in that direction.
The book is organized into Parts as follows.
The first step in learning to become an Agile Project Manager is to learn the fundamentals of Agile, which includes not only the mechanics of how an Agile project based on Scrum works, but also understanding the principles behind it at a deeper level so that you can go beyond just implementing it “by the book.”
Agile is causing us to broaden our vision of what a Project Manager is and that will have a dramatic impact on the potential roles that a Project Manager can play in an Agile environment. In fact, the role of a Project Manager at a team level in a typical Agile/Scrum project is undefined. That will cause us to rethink many of the things we have taken for granted about Project Management for a long time to develop a broader vision of what an Agile Project Manager is.
Part 2 provided an overview of Agile Project Management. In this Part, we will go into much more detail on Agile Project Management planning and management practices including:
There are many precedents for successful implementation of Agile principles and practices at a project team level; however, extending the Agile principles and practices to large‐scale enterprise implementations and integrating with a business environment can be very difficult and introduces a number of new challenges, which include:
This Part of the book is intended to address these topics and provide an understanding of the key considerations that need to be addressed for:
Putting together a complete, top‐to‐bottom, enterprise‐level Agile solution can be a very challenging task, especially when some of the pieces are not designed to fit together.
To simplify the design of an enterprise‐level Agile implementation, it is useful to have some predefined frameworks that can be modified to fit a given business environment, rather than having to start from scratch to design an overall management approach.
Three frameworks are discussed in this Part:
In any book of this nature, it’s always useful to go beyond theory and concepts and show how companies have actually put these ideas into practice in the real‐world. Of course, there is no canned approach that works for all companies—each of these case studies is different and shows how a different approach may be needed in different situations. It also includes a chapter on “Not‐So‐Successful” case studies, which shows some of the problems that can develop in an Agile implementation.
The appendices to the book include additional supplementary information:
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