Advanced Agile Project Management: Creating the Flexibility to Thrive

Leader: Jim Highsmith, Cutter Consortium Fellow

Workshop Overview:

Agile development and project management can be viewed as an engineering capability or as a strategic business capability. Executives hold the key to a wider implementation of agile thinking, and this two-day workshop examines how that can be accomplished. In just two days, Cutter Fellow Jim Highsmith will explain how the Agile Triangle, a new slant on project governance, and practices to scale agile projects can help your enterprise move beyond successful agile projects to becoming a successful Agile Enterprise.

Agile project management and development has expanded into organizations worldwide at an astonishing rate over the last 6-8 years. However, myths, challenges, and opportunities related to agility are still plentiful. In recent studies by Cutter Senior Consultant Michael Mah, it was two agile software companies that had the highest productivity indexes (compared against an historical data base of over 7,500 projects). What makes these companies so productive? They have gone beyond thinking of agile as a software development capability to thinking of agility as strategic business capability. Another company, a large international telecommunications firm, sees transitioning their 20,000+ IT staffers to agile methods as a mandatory strategic move that will create the flexibility it needs to survive and thrive in their future competitive environment.

One or two or four successful agile projects does not make a successful Agile Enterprise. From project governance to production support to project management, there are a multitude of issues that can impede an organization that can successfully complete agile projects from becoming a successful Agile Enterprise.

In this two-day workshop, Cutter Fellow Jim Highsmith explores a variety of advanced topics, from release planning to phase-gate project governance, that will help you think of agile in new and important ways. Since the expectation is that participants will have a variety of agile experiences already, this workshop encourages extensive knowledge sharing.

The topics of this advanced workshop include Agile integration, which focuses on seven key areas in which agile concepts and practices must be integrated into the enterprise: projects, organization, process, culture, governance, alignment, and performance; measuring performance; scaling agile to large projects; the prevalent mismanagement of self-organizing teams; planning for what you know and scanning for what you don't; a review of agile principles (both the Agile Manifesto for Software Development and the Declaration of Inter-dependence for Project Leadership - Jim Highsmith is a co-author of both); and the art of software quality.

The take aways from this in-depth workshop will provide you with a path for your organization to both enhance its ability to deliver successful agile projects and transform itself into an organization that fully embraces the agile ethic.

Prerequisite: Agile Project Management -- Results-Oriented Practices for Turbulent Times or comparable experience

Workshop Goals:

This workshop, with its management and executive orientation, will address the benefits of agile development and introduce the Agile Triangle - Value, Quality, and Constraints - as a better method of measuring development performance. The workshop will show how, by combining managerial agility with technical agility, your enterprise can increase value, improve quality, reduce schedules, and contain costs. This workshop will help your organization:

• Develop a strategy for making agility a strategic business capability
• Understand the combination of managerial and technical agility
• Scale agility to very large projects
• Increase its ability to deliver innovative new products
• Incorporate speed and mobility into your projects
• Understand advanced release planning practices
• Implement an agile performance measurement tool: The Agile Triangle focused on Value and Quality
• Apply a phase-gate project control system to large agile projects
• Learn how to calculate feature and story value-points

You'll discover how agile development and project management can become strategic capabilities in executing business plans, how agile can lead to innovative solutions to attain business objectives, and how agile can improve customer responsiveness. Through the application of a unique agile lifecycle framework, you'll learn how your organization can make dramatic improvements in its project success rate and your project teams' ability to cope with change.

Workshop Outline:

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

1. The Vision of Business Agile
   • Strategic business agility drivers
   • A framework for agile project management
   • Managerial and technical agility
2. Beyond Scope, Schedule, and Cost: Measuring Agile Performance
   • Traditional project measurements
   • Delivering product quality
   • Delivering product value
   • The Agile Triangle
3. Advanced Release Planning
   • Similarities and differences between traditional and agile planning
   • Gathering requirements and building a Product Backlog
   • Creating capability/feature/story cards
   • Creating release, and iteration plans
   • Calculating feature/story value points
   • Understanding Wish-based planning
   • Iteration
4. Scaling Agile Projects
   • A scaling model
   • Scaling self-organizing teams
   • Scaling product
   • Scaling process
5. Portfolio Management and Project Governance
   • Integrating agile with a Phase-Gate control system
   • A responsive portfolio management system
6. The Agile Transformation
   • Creating an agile culture
   • Three waves of change
   • Seven transition areas
   • The Satir Change curve

Download the brochure