Customer Reviews

Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

As someone who has managed large custom software projects and programs for 20 years, I was concerned that applying Agile to project management would simply mean burndown charts and the like. What I found in Highsmith's book is a perceptive understanding of how people think, feel and actually work on projects. Approaches that take human behavior into account, in my experience, are far more successful than those that don't.

The concepts covered here, if really absorbed and understood, can benefit any project. I found Chapter 7 to be the most valuable for my current product development team, and ordered copies of the book for all my managers.

APM claims to be a fresh approach to developing better products, be these hardware or software. Highsmith writes gracefully and most of the book sounds sensible. To me, the key point in APM is the continuous innovation. If the cost of experimenting falls sufficiently, then the people working on a project should seriously consider an overall strategy of attempting development phases that are, say, a week or so in length. And iterating. The idea is to explore as much as possible, with the cost in time being minimal.

This is in contrast to the conventional method of drawing up detailed specifications and a timeline, at the start of a project, in Pert or Gantt charts, and then forcing development to conform to those specifications and schedule.

[The continuous innovation and reduced delivery schedules are also explored at length in a companion book, "User Stories Applied" by Cohn, ISBN 0321-205685.]

Perhaps the best nugget I found in Highsmith's book is that "agility" involves an optimal amount of structure. He illustrated that by saying that in a highly changing development environment, a rigorous configuration management discipline is essential as the bedrock framework. In software, that is spot on. The quicker your group's code changes, the more the need for strict checkin. Invariably, rollbacks (oops!) are necessary.

APM may work best for software and small hardware projects. Where you can experiment cheaply, especially with simulations. For large hardware projects, this basic premise may not hold. The widespread use of Pert and Gantt charts, and the techniques behind these, exist not entirely, or even mostly, because of inertia. Expert judgment does usually go into these, and sometimes there is no other alternative.

His putdown of Business Process Reengineering is that its greatest flaw was in elevating process over people. Some of you will surely have wry grins over this.

This book is a thoroughly enjoyable read, from the emphasis on principles, the excellent job navigating the difficult territory of the line between prescribed process and anarchy, and the stages a team goes through as it embraces an agile style of development. I even thought that the hypothetical story added a nice element of repetition to each section that helped drive home the main points.

The one thing I would've liked was for this book to get off the fence and decide to be software-related. Almost every example is software related (except for the basketball analogy that got beaten to death...), but it goes out of the way not to specify software practices because this is about arbitrary project management. The book's in the "Agile Software Development Series" and the author is primarily a software consultant. I'd prefer it stuck to software rather than trying to go for broader appeal because there were several practice areas where detail was elided on that basis and could've really helped make the practices more concrete.

Also, it would've been nice to have a little grid mapping up common-day software development methodologies like Scrum, XP, FDD, and DSDM against the practices in the book. I tried to do it in my head, but once you get past 5x5, it's something that should've been provided.

With this latest book "Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products", Jim Highsmith completes what could be considered his trilogy on adaptive and agile software development and he does so masterfully with practical guidance around the maturation of his adaptive vision.

In his first book "Adaptive Software Development", Jim introduced his premise around the lessons that software development can learn from the scientific study of complex adaptive systems (CAS) as applied in biology, chemistry, and even physics: primarily, that software development cannot be straitjacketed into a prescriptive process but rather most benefits from adaptive and emergent-oriented approaches. To that end, much of his approach emphasizes the need for greater communication and collaboration in project teams in order to be effectively adaptive.

His second book "Agile Software Development Ecosystems" provides the survey and guidance to understand and apply some of the extant adaptive frameworks: DSDM, Scrum, XP, FDD, Lean Development, Crystal, and his own Adaptive Software Development. In this way, he reinforces his initial vision by moving the discussion from one approach to multiple approaches. He then closes the book with a simple vocabulary to apply at an organizational level for developing one's own agile approach.

Finally, with "Agile Project Management" Jim truly completes the journey by bringing us the innovative and emergent theme that underscores his two previous works; that is, that we cannot just adapt software development techniques per se, but must also be clear in our project management approaches around those practices. He compels us to do so by offering 5 fundamental phases agile project management that shift our emphasis from control and plan to innovation through exploration and experimentation: Envision, Speculate, Explore, Adapt, and Close. Coupled with this road to innovation, Jim provides very clear and practical guidance around the specific project management practices that make the steps come alive in the team context such as collaboration through participatory decision making.

For my part, I have dog-eared practically every other page in this Highsmith version of "Return of the King" for the rich, straightforward guidance therein. I highly recommend this book, whether you choose to read it alone, or consider enjoying the adaptive journey fully by reading Jim's other two books as well. Whichever path you choose, you won't be disappointed.

This book is well-written and provides both a good explanation of agile software development and insights into how to manage such a project. My disappointment comes from fact that Highsmith emphasizes that one has to find the right people in order to succeed with this kind of project, and doesn't provide much info about how to identify the right people or how to train people with potential to work this way. Given the emphasis on the importance of the right team, more space in the book should be devoted to that aspect of management.

In his book, "Agile Project Management - Creating Innovative Products" Jim Highsmith ties together the two worlds of Agile Methodologies and Project Management and in the process provides evolutionary growth in both. The book describes Project Management's place in Agile Methodologies and at the same time provides the next stage of project management growth from Command and Control to what Jim refers to as Leadership - Collaboration. The six principles and 18 practices of Agile Project Management that Jim discusses in the book provide a much needed combination of underlying principles and practical practices that are missing in a great deal of current Project Management thinking.

Jim wrote this book in a very readable fashion with short conversations between two project managers at the beginning of each chapter and several examples spread throughout the book. These conversations and examples help to make the material more applicable to the reader.

The combination of the principles and practices and the readable style of the book are the characteristics that lead me to rate the book as highly as I do. I highly recommend this book to any project manager who is looking for that next step of growth in their career, or for anyone who is looking for a better understanding of the place in Project Management in agile methodologies.

Highsmith's third book, "Agile Project Management : Creating Innovative Products", is one of those rare books which give me that Elton John feeling of "you took the words right out of my mind". That stated, even though I felt this when reading the book (and with his former books) this is not to say that Highsmith doesn't provide a lot of new insights, it's just that the principles and practices outlined in the book are all in the spirit of those words floating around in my mind, so to speak. Words like 'adaptation', 'camaraderie', 'discipline', 'coaching', 'leadership', 'collaboration', 'communication', 'technical excellence', and more. What I find Highsmith do better than any other Agilist I've read so far, is convey the practical aspects of Agility with the human, social side of collaborative, competitive, exciting work. An inspiring quote on p. 256 says a lot:
"Delivering valuable products is important, and it's critical to project management success. No project team can exist for long without delivering value to its customers. But in the long run, how we deliver, how we interact at work, and how we treat each other as human beings are even more important."

This is a book all project managers should read. If you're not a project manager you should still read it; I'm a software developer and I was quite inspired by it. I won't go into the details of Highsmith's proposed APM framework, the principles and practices that make up that framework, but I implore you to get this book and read about them yourselves.