Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products [Paperback]

Jim Highsmith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 16, 2004 | ISBN-10: 0321219775 | ISBN-13: 978-0321219770

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

 

 

 

 

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (April 16, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321219775
• ISBN-13: 978-0321219770
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 0.8 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #475,785 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #48 in Books > Computers & Technology > Business & Management > Project Management > Agile

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Good content, irritating delivery February 5, 2011

By Watcher

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book provides a reasonable overview of employing agile project management. Hwever, I found it difficult to read because of the sheer volume of space it dedicated to discussing how superior agile project management is to traditional project management. And what the author thinks of as traditional project management is actually dysfunctional project management. He's clearly been involved in a number of traditional PM projects run in highly mismanaged organizations where bad process prevails and people spend a lot of time subverting useful best practices. OK, sure, this can happen. It can happen with Agile as well. But it's distracting when every page or two I'm thinking to myself, "that's not necessarily true, I've run traditional PM projects without that happening." I may well use agile in the future, but please, focus on the subject and not the endless preaching.

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful book full of immediately practical advice May 2, 2004

By Michael Cohn

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Experience, knowledge, wisdom and structure together December 17, 2004

By Alejandro Berganza

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.