Agile Project Management For Dummies E-Book

Mark C. Layton

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 467

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Be flexible and faster with Agile project management As mobile and web technologies continue to evolve rapidly, thereis added pressure to develop and implement software projects inweeks instead of months. Agile Project Management ForDummies can make that happen. This is the first book to providea simple, step-by-step guide to Agile Project Managementapproaches, tools, and techniques. With the fast pace of mobile andweb technology development, software project development must keeppace; Agile Project Management enables developers to complete andimplement projects more quickly and this book shows you how. * Offers a practical context for understanding and applying Agiletechniques, moving from theory into actual practice * Explains when to use Agile and how to avoid commonpitfalls * Written by experts who know how to apply the principles inreal-world situations Agile Project Management For Dummies enables you tounderstand and apply Agile principles for faster, more accuratedevelopment.

Leseprobe

Agile Project Management For Dummies®

Visit www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/agileprojectmanagement to view this book's cheat sheet.

Table of Contents

Introduction

About This Book

Foolish Assumptions

Conventions Used in This Book

How This Book Is Organized

Part I: Understanding Agile

Part II: Being Agile

Part III: Working in Agile

Part IV: Managing in Agile

Part V: Ensuring Agile Success

Part VI: The Part of Tens

Icons Used in This Book

Where to Go from Here

Part I: Understanding Agile

Chapter 1: Modernizing Project Management

Project Management Needed Makeover

The origins of modern project management

The problem with the status quo

Introducing Agile Project Management

How agile projects work

Why agile projects work better

Chapter 2: The Agile Manifesto and Principles

Understanding the Agile Manifesto

Outlining the Four Values of the Agile Manifesto

Value 1: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Value 2: Working software over comprehensive documentation

Value 3: Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Value 4: Responding to change over following a plan

Defining the 12 Agile Principles

Agile principles of customer satisfaction

Agile principles of quality

Agile principles of teamwork

Agile principles of project management

Adding the Platinum Principles

Resisting formality

Thinking and acting as a team

Visualizing rather than writing

Changes as a Result of Agile

The Agile Litmus Test

Chapter 3: Why Agile Works Better

Evaluating Agile Benefits

How Agile Approaches Beat Historical Approaches

Greater flexibility and stability

Reduced nonproductive tasks

Higher quality, delivered faster

Improved team performance

Tighter project control

Faster and less costly failure

Why People Like Agile

Executives

Product development and customers

Management

Development teams

Part II: Being Agile

Chapter 4: Agile Frameworks

Diving Under the Umbrella of Agile Approaches

Reviewing the Big Three: Lean, Extreme Programming, and Scrum

An overview of lean

An overview of extreme programming

An overview of scrum

Putting It All Together

Chapter 5: Putting Agile into Action: The Environment

Creating the Physical Environment

Collocating the team

Setting up a dedicated area

Removing distractions

Going mobile

Low-Tech Communicating

High-Tech Communicating

Choosing Tools

The purpose of the tool

Organizational and compatibility constraints

Chapter 6: Putting Agile into Action: The Behaviors

Establishing Agile Roles

Development team

Product owner

Scrum master

Stakeholders

Agile mentor

Establishing New Values

Commitment

Focus

Openness

Respect

Courage

Changing Team Philosophy

Cross-functionality

Self-organization

Self-management

Size-limited teams

Mature behavior

Part III: Working in Agile

Chapter 7: Defining the Product Vision and Product Roadmap

Planning in Agile

Planning as necessary

Inspect and adapt

Defining the Product Vision

Step 1: Developing the product objective

Step 2: Creating a draft vision statement

Step 3: Validating and revising the vision statement

Step 4: Finalizing the vision statement

Creating a Product Roadmap

Step 1: Identifying product requirements

Step 2: Arranging product features

Step 3: Estimating and ordering the product’s features

Step 4: Determining high-level time frames

Saving your work

Chapter 8: Planning Releases and Sprints

Refining Requirements and Estimates

What is a user story?

Steps to create a user story

Breaking down requirements

Estimation poker

Affinity estimating

Release Planning

Completing the product backlog

Creating the release plan

Sprint Planning

The sprint backlog

The sprint planning meeting

Chapter 9: Working Through the Day

Planning the Day: The Daily Scrum

Tracking Progress

The sprint backlog

The task board

Agile Roles Within the Sprint

Creating Shippable Functionality

Elaborating

Developing

Verifying

Identifying roadblocks

The End of the Day

Chapter 10: Showcasing Work and Incorporating Feedback

The Sprint Review

Preparing to demonstrate

The sprint review meeting

Collecting feedback in the sprint review meeting

The Sprint Retrospective

Planning for retrospectives

The retrospective meeting

Inspecting and adapting

Chapter 11: Preparing for Release

Preparing the Product for Deployment: The Release Sprint

Preparing the Organization for Product Deployment

Preparing the Marketplace for Product Deployment

Part IV: Managing in Agile

Chapter 12: Managing Scope and Procurement

What’s Different About Scope in Agile

How to Manage Scope in Agile

Understanding scope throughout the project

Introducing scope changes

Managing scope changes

Using agile artifacts for scope management

What’s Different About Procurement in Agile

How to Manage Procurement in Agile

Determining need and selecting a vendor

Contracts and cost approaches for services

Organizational considerations for procurement

Working with a vendor

Closing a contract

Chapter 13: Managing Time and Cost

What’s Different About Time in Agile

How to Manage Time in Agile

Introducing velocity

Monitoring and adjusting velocity

Managing scope changes from a time perspective

Managing time by using multiple teams

Using agile artifacts for time management

What’s Different About Cost in Agile

How to Manage Cost in Agile

Creating an initial budget

Creating a self-funding project

Using velocity to determine long-range costs

Using agile artifacts for cost management

Chapter 14: Managing Team Dynamics and Communication

What’s Different About Team Dynamics in Agile

How to Manage Team Dynamics in Agile

Becoming self-managing and self-organizing

Supporting the team: The servant-leader

Working with a dedicated team

Working with a cross-functional team

Establishing an agile environment

Limiting development team size

Managing projects with dislocated teams

What’s Different About Communication in Agile

How to Manage Communication in Agile

Understanding agile communication methods

Status and progress reporting

Chapter 15: Managing Quality and Risk

What’s Different About Quality in Agile

How to Manage Quality in Agile

Quality and the sprint

Proactive quality

Quality through regular inspecting and adapting

Automated testing

What’s Different About Risk in Agile

How to Manage Risk in Agile

Reducing risk inherently

Identifying, prioritizing, and responding to risks

Part V: Ensuring Agile Success

Chapter 16: Building a Foundation

Commitment of the Organization and of Individuals

Organizational commitment

Individual commitment

How to get commitment

Will it be possible to make the transition?

What is the best timing for moving to agile?

Choosing the Right Project Team Members

The development team

The scrum master

The product owner

The agile champion

The agile mentor

The project stakeholders

Creating an Environment That Works for Agile

Support Agile Initially and Over Time

Chapter 17: Being a Change Agent

Making Agile Work in Your Organization

Step 1: Conduct an implementation strategy

Step 2: Establish a transformation team

Step 3: Build awareness and excitement

Step 4: Identify a pilot project

Step 5: Identify success metrics

Step 6: Train sufficiently

Step 7: Develop a product strategy

Step 8: Develop the product roadmap, the product backlog, and estimates

Step 9: Running your first sprint

Step 10: Make mistakes, gather feedback, and improve

Step 11: Mature

Step 12: Scale virally

Avoiding Pitfalls

Questions to Prevent Problems

Part VI: The Part of Tens

Chapter 18: Ten Key Benefits of Agile Project Management

Better Product Quality

Higher Customer Satisfaction

Higher Team Morale

Increased Collaboration and Ownership

Customized Team Structures

More Relevant Metrics

Improved Performance Visibility

Increased Project Control

Improved Project Predictability

Reduced Risk

Chapter 19: Ten Key Metrics for Agile Project Management

Sprint Goal Success Rates

Defects

Total Project Duration

Time to Market

Total Project Cost

Return on Investment

New Requests Within ROI Budgets

Capital Redeployment

Satisfaction Surveys

Team Member Turnover

Chapter 20: Ten Key Resources for Agile Project Management

Agile Project Management For Dummies Online Cheat Sheet

The Agile Alliance

The Scrum Alliance

The Project Management Institute Agile Community

Agile Leadership Network

Scrum Development Yahoo! Group

InfoQ

Lean Essays

What Is Extreme Programming?

Platinum Edge

Cheat Sheet

Agile Project Management For Dummies®

by Mark C. Layton

Agile Project Management For Dummies®

Published byJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc.111 River St.Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774

Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

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About the Author

Mark C. Layton, known globally as Mr. Agile, is an organizational strategist and PMI certification instructor with over 20 years in the project/program management field. He is the Los Angeles chair for the Agile Leadership Network and is the founder of Platinum Edge, Inc. — an organizational improvement company that supports businesses making the Waterfall-to-Agile transition.

Prior to founding Platinum Edge in 2001, Mark developed his expertise as a consulting firm executive, program management coach, and in-the-trenches project leader. Mark holds MBAs from the University of California, Los Angeles, and the National University of Singapore; a B.Sc. (summa cum laude) in Behavioral Science from the University of La Verne; and an A.S. in Electronic Systems from the Air Force’s Air College. He is also a Distinguished Graduate of the Air Force’s Leadership School, a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), and a recipient of Stanford University’s advanced project management certification (SCPM).

When he isn’t overseeing client engagements, Mark is a frequent speaker on extreme programming (XP), lean, scrum, and other agile solutions. Living mostly on an airplane, he splits his time between New York, Los Angeles, London, and Singapore. Additional information can be found at www.platinumedge.com.

Dedication

To Kiyoko — whose unwavering love and support make these accomplishments possible and worth pursuing.

Author’s Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank the numerous people who contributed to this book and helped make it a reality. Anna and Liam Kennedy, whose creativity and optimism were the spark that started this journey; Scott Fennel, whose guidance ensured it happened; Caroline Patchen, for turning vague ideas into compelling images and remaining pleasant through my fickleness; Anna Kennedy (again) for driving the text forward; and Rachele Maurer, for your invaluable input, editing, and support. This book would not have been possible without every one of you, and I am eternally grateful. I’d also like to thank the amazing team at John Wiley & Sons — Katie Feltman, Colleen Totz Diamond, Mark Enochs, and the many, many others who contributed their expertise to making this book the smart, simple field guide I hoped it would become.

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Introduction

Welcome to Agile Project Management For Dummies. Agile project management is one of the fastest-growing management techniques in business today. Over the past decade, I have trained and coached companies big and small, all over the world, about how to successfully run agile projects. Through this work, I found that there was a need to write a digestible guide that the average person could understand and use.

In this book, I will clear up some of the myths about what agile project management is and what it is not. The information in this book will give you the confidence to know you can be successful using agile techniques.

About This Book

Agile Project Management For Dummies is meant to be more than just an introduction to agile practices and methodologies. This book defines agile project management approaches and teaches you the steps to execute agile techniques on a project. The material here goes beyond theory and is meant to be a field manual, accessible to the everyday person, giving you the tools and information you need to be successful with agile processes in the trenches of project management.

Foolish Assumptions

If you are reading this book, you might have a passing familiarity with project management. Perhaps you are a project manager, or a member of a project team, or a stakeholder on a project. Here are a few terms related to project management that you will see throughout this book:

Project: Planned program of work that requires a definitive amount of time, effort, and planning to complete. Projects have goals and objectives and often have to be completed in some fixed period of time and within a certain budget.

Project management: The processes used to complete a project.

Waterfall: A traditional style of project management. Waterfall relies on completing work in distinct stages like requirements, design, development, testing, and deployment. In waterfall projects, you do not start one stage until you have completed the previous stage.

Agile project management: A style of project management that focuses on early delivery of business value, continuous improvement of the project’s product and processes, scope flexibility, team input, and delivering well-tested products that reflect customer needs.

Requirements: The list of product features desired from a project.

Design: The stage where an outline or plan is made for creating individual product features.

Development: The stage where product features are created.

Testing: The stage where the developed product features are ensured to work.

Integration: The stage where individual product features are enabled to work with one another and related products.

Deployment: The final stage of a project where completed product features are moved to a state where they can be used.

Scope: Everything included in a project.

Estimate (verb): To determine the effort, length, cost, or priority of a task, requirement, release, or even a whole project.

Estimate (noun): The effort, length, or cost of a task, requirement, iteration, release, or even a whole project.

Conventions Used in This Book

If you do an online search, you will see the word agile; different agile roles, meetings, and documents; and various agile methodologies capitalized. I shied away from this practice for a couple of reasons.

To start, none of these items are really proper nouns. “Agile” is an adjective that describes a number of items in project management, agile projects, agile teams, agile processes, and so on, but it is not a proper noun, and except in chapter or section titles, you will not see me use it that way.

For readability, I did not capitalize agile-related roles, meetings, and documents. Such terms include agile project, product owner, scrum master, development team, user stories, product backlog, and more. You may, however, see these terms capitalized in places other than this book.

There are some exceptions. The Agile Manifesto and the Agile Principles are copyrighted material. The Agile Alliance, Scrum Alliance, and Project Management Institute are professional organizations. Certified ScrumMaster and PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner are professional titles.

How This Book Is Organized

Agile Project Management For Dummies has six parts. Each part focuses on a different aspect of agile project management, and will help you understand, use and implement agile processes.

Part I: Understanding Agile

In Part I, I introduce you to agile project management. You find out why agile approaches are becoming popular and how they are changing product development. You learn about the foundation of all agile methodologies: the Agile Manifesto and the 12 Agile Principles. You see why agile processes work better than traditional project management processes.

Part II: Being Agile

In Part II, I tell you how agile affects fundamental behaviors and thought processes around product development. You get a closer look at specific agile frameworks. You find out about the different roles on agile projects and how to create an environment and establish values conducive to success with agile project management.

Part III: Working in Agile

In Part III, I show you how to work on an agile project and what the different iterative stages are in agile projects. You find out how to define a product and how agile approaches help you refine the product as you learn more about the product. I cover the day-to-day work in the life of an agile project. You find out how to showcase working product functionality at regular intervals in the project and how to continuously improve your processes. I also go over how to release a product in an agile project.

Part IV: Managing in Agile

In Part IV, I help you understand how to manage each of the different project management areas using agile approaches. You’ll know how agile processes affect project scope, procurement, time, cost, teams, communication, quality, and risk.

Part V: Ensuring Agile Success

In Part V, I tell you what you need to know to successfully transition your organization to agile project management. You find out how to build a strong agile foundation and learn specific steps for moving from a traditional project management approach to an agile approach.

Part VI: The Part of Tens

In Part VI, I show you three groups of important, useful information about agile project management. You’ll see ten benefits of agile project management, ten metrics you can use to measure agile project success, and ten resources to help you along your agile journey.

Icons Used in This Book

Throughout this book, you will find a few icons. Here is what each icon means.

Tips are points to help you along your agile project management journey. Tips can save you time and help you quickly understand more about a particular topic, so when you see them, take a look!

The Remember icon is a reminder of something you may have seen in past chapters. These icons can help jog your memory when an important term or concept appears.

The Warning icon indicates that you want to watch out for a certain action or behavior. Be sure to read these to steer clear of big problems!

The Technical Stuff icon indicates information that is interesting but not essential to the text. If you see a Technical Stuff icon, you don’t need to read it to understand agile project management, but the information there might just perk your attention.

The 12 Principles icon appears any time I refer to the 12 Agile Principles throughout the book. See Chapter 2 to quickly get up to speed on the Principles.

On the Web means that you can find more information on the book’s website at www.dummies.com/go/agileprojectmanagementfd.

Where to Go from Here

I wrote this book so that you could read it in just about any order. Depending on your role, you may want to pay extra attention to the appropriate sections of the book. For example:

If you are just starting to learn about project management and agile approaches, it would be a good idea to start with Chapter 1 and read the book straight through to the end.

If you are a member of a project team and you want to know the basics of how to work on an agile project, you might start with the information in Part III — Chapters 7 through 11.

If you are a project manager and are wondering how agile approaches affect your job, Part IV — Chapters 12 through 15 — is a great part to review.

If you know the basics of agile project management and you are looking at bringing agile practices to your company or organization, Chapters 16 and 17 in Part V provide you with helpful information.

Occasionally, we have updates to our technology books. If this book does have technical updates, they will be posted at:

www.dummies.com/go/agileprojectmanagementfdupdates

Please note that some special symbols used in this eBook may not display properly on all eReader devices. If you have trouble determining any symbol, please call Wiley Product Technical Support at 800-762-2974. Outside of the United States, please call 317-572-3993. You can also contact Wiley Product Technical Support at www.wiley.com/techsupport.

Part I

Understanding Agile

In this part . . .

Project management has traditionally been a challenging practice, with high expectations, limited resources and, unfortunately, low success rates. In the following chapters, I uncover why project management needs to modernize. I show you historical approaches to project management and explain their flaws and weaknesses.

You find out why agile methodologies are quickly growing as an alternative to traditional project management. I also provide an introduction to the foundation of agile project management: the Agile Manifesto and the 12 Agile Principles. Finally, I show you the advantages that your products, project, team, customers, and organization can gain from adopting agile project management.

Chapter 1

Modernizing Project Management

In This Chapter

Understanding why project management needs to change

Finding out about agile project management

Agile project management is a style of project management that focuses on early delivery of business value, continuous improvement of the project’s product and processes, scope flexibility, team input, and delivering well-tested products that reflect customer needs.

In this chapter, you find out why agile processes emerged as an approach to software development project management in the mid-1990s and why agile methodologies have caught the attention of project managers, customers who invest in the development of new software, and executives whose companies fund software development departments. This chapter also explains the advantages of agile methodologies over long-standing approaches to project management.