Agile Project Management: Innovation in Action

General Overview:

If companies are to survive in this turbulent economy, they must re-examine both their processes and their perspectives with regard to change. We are no longer talking about 15%-20% scope creep on projects. Everything — scope, features, technology, architecture — may change within the span of six months. Unfortunately, most commonly used project management practices don't provide the tools necessary to manage this continuous change.

This workshop, presented by Jim Highsmith — author of the acclaimed book Adaptive Software Development — provides you and your team with tools and strategies for employing agile project management practices (APM) for increased project success.

This workshop will help you determine when to apply APM over traditional project management. You'll learn why a well-thought-out approach to APM can help you increase innovation, keep costs down, and shorten your product development cycle — while you still adhere to internal and external project constraints.

This workshop will help your organization:

• Increase your ability to deliver innovative new products
• Incorporate speed and mobility into your projects
• Bridge the gap between teams using agile software development methods (e.g. Extreme Programming) and your project management office staff
• Lessen the impact of compliance work on development schedules
• Develop a "customer voice" to identify and prioritize features
• Use a tradeoff matrix to remind stakeholders that changes have consequences
• Successfully manage a product features list
• Plan and manage frequent, feature-driven delivery iterations
• Employ "milestones" to review progress and make adjustments
• Get project managers to act as facilitators and coordinators, rather than the "ultimate authority"
• Incorporate collaborative decisionmaking skills within your team
• "Celebrate" the close of a project

Plus, you'll discover how to apply key APM practices, such as a product vision box, a project data sheet, and feature cards, for increased project success. You'll identify questions your executives should ask to ensure agile projects are being controlled, practices to help you through the envision phase of an APM project, rules for daily integration meetings, steps for making sustainable decisions, and practical objectives for customer focus groups.

Leader: Jim Highsmith

Workshop Goals:

This workshop will help you understand advanced techniques for iteration planning, collaboration, and project management targeted at situations in which projects have high-exploration factors, customer responsiveness is paramount, and operate within organizations with innovative cultures. Through the application of a unique APM lifecycle framework, this workshop will help you encourage dramatic improvements in your project success rate and your project team's ability to cope with change.

Intended Audience:

Teams in which there are extreme pressures (high speed, high change, and uncertainty) on the delivery process.

Outline:

This learning experience combines both concept and practice in covering the following topics:

1. The Vision of Agile Project Management
   • Exploratory projects agile principles
   • A framework for agile project management
2. Identifying "Who" the Players Are
   • Identifying all the stakeholders and their roles
   • Defining the customer-developer interface for the project
3. Determining "What" Product to Deliver
   • Developing a product vision box and elevator statement
   • Creating a project data sheet and trade off matrix
   • Determining the exploration factor
   • The role of product architecture in agile development
4. Agreeing on "How" to Approach Project
   • Agreeing on technical and project management practices
   • Developing a collaboration, communication, and decisionmaking plan
5. Planning an Agile Project
   • Similarities and differences between traditional and agile planning
   • Gathering requirements and building a feature list
   • Creating feature cards
   • Moving from work breakdown structures to feature breakdown structures
   • Creating release, milestone, and iteration plans
   • Using iteration 0
6. Iteratively Deliver Features
   • Conducting daily team integration meetings
   • Interacting with customers daily
   • Displaying key project information
   • Managing the "mood" of the project team
7. Monitoring and Adapting
   • Conducting customer focus group sessions
   • Conducting project milestone retrospectives
   • Conducting milestone technical reviews
   • Creating project status review information
   • Determining project adaptive adjustments
8. Closing Projects
9. Team Collaboration
   • The six dimensions of collaboration
   • Peer-to-peer collaboration: pair programming, inspections, daily integration meetings
   • Group-to-group collaboration: customer focus groups, JAD sessions
   • Knowledge sharing and communities of practice
   • Collaborative project management tools
10. Collaborative Decisionmaking
    • Outlining the need for a decisionmaking focus
    • Framing project decisions
    • Using a collaborative decisionmaking process
    • Getting past the groan zone
    • Including decisionmaking in your retrospectives
11. Leadership-Collaboration Management
    • Moving from command-control to leadership-collaboration management

For more information on bringing this workshop to your organization, contact Dennis Crowley by phone at +1 781 641 5125, by fax at +1 781 648 1950, or by e-mail at sales@cutter.com.