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Jim Highsmith
Director and Fellow
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Jim Highsmith is Director of Cutter Consortium's Agile Software Development & Project Management practice and is a Fellow of the Cutter Business Technology Council, which prepares the Opinions for Cutter's Business Technology Trends and Impacts service. Mr. Highsmith is also a frequent keynoter at the annual Cutter Summits . Mr. Highsmith is the recipient of the 2005 Stevens Award, in recognition of his work on Adaptive Software Development and agile processes.
Mr. Highsmith has 25-plus years experience as an IT manager, product manager, project manager, consultant, and software developer. He 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. Mr. Highsmith's areas of consulting include agile software development, project management, and collaboration.
Mr. Highsmith has held technical and management positions with software, computer hardware, banking and energy companies. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. in Management. Mr. Highsmith is author of Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products and Agile Software Development Ecosystems (Addison-Wesley, 2002), which portrays the principles, problem domains, key industry leaders, and project success stories, associated with Agile methodologies. His first book, Adaptive Software Development: A Collaborative Approach to Managing Complex Systems (Dorset House, 2000) won the prestigious Jolt Award. Jim is also co-editor, with Alistair Cockburn, of the Agile Software Development Series of books from Addison Wesley. He is a coauthor of the Agile Manifesto, and a founding member of both the AgileAlliance and the Agile Project Leadership Network, where he serves as president.
A frequent speaker at conferences worldwide, Mr. Highsmith has published dozens of articles in major industry publications and was the editor of Cutter's eBusiness Application Delivery newsletter. His ideas about project management in the Information Age have been featured in ComputerWorld and the Economic Times in India. He can be reached at consulting@cutter.com.
No More Self-Organizing Teams
I’ve been thinking recently that the term “self-organizing” has outlived its usefulness in the agile community and needs to be replaced. While self-organizing is a good term, it has, unfortunately, become confused with anarchy in the minds of many. Why has this occurred? Because there is a contingent within the agile community that is fundamentally anarchist at heart and it has latched onto the term self-organizing because it sounds better than anarchy. However, putting a duck suit on a chicken doesn’t make a chicken a duck. As larger and larger organizations are implementing agile methods and practices, the core of what it means to be agile — an empowering organizational culture — will be lost because large organizations will reject the cultural piece of agile because they know a chicken when they see one. […]
Read Jim Highsmith's "No More Self-Organizing Teams" on the Cutter Blog
"Today's world is bifurcating."
Client Profile: Global Leader in Publishing Information for Professionals
This client's publication services, both print and web-based, cover medical, legal, education, and business. Cutter's senior team worked with key client mangers to raise the awareness of agile methods within the organization, including an all-day session with world-wide managers in New York City, and a speaking engagement at the clients world wide technical conference. more...
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