Extreme Project Management > Agile Performance Support

Does your PMO Produce Multiple Obstacles for your project or Promote Many Opportunities for success? PMOs often get a bad reputation on agile teams, but it need not be that way--they can also add tremendous support and be a great help.

QA in an Agile environment is very different…are your teams ready? Here we look at how QA needs to evolve in order to best support Agile development practices.

As businesses enter the "new normal" era of economic uncertainty, program and portfolio management offices that remain tactically and administratively-focused will struggle. Successful PMOs in 2012 will move towards a strageic, holistic view that embraces agile methods and increases visibility for executives.

Part 1 of this two-part series introduces the agile engineering principles and practices that, when implemented, enable some teams and their respective organizations to build high-quality software very quickly that will please customers. Organizations embracing these practices--when used in conjunction with agile and lean management practices--can gain delivery advantages on their competitors while managing lower maintenance and support costs in the long term.

We all want Subject Matter Experts, but what happens if we get Subject Matter Zeros? How does that impact your schedule, and what about team members who have “other project commitments”? Before you know it, that six-month schedule that looked pretty comfortable is looking like a fairy tale.

At the heart of agile methods is the key tenet that teams and teamwork are better than individual contributions and effort. Here we explore the key factors and attributes of teams and teamwork for agile project management.

Agile and earned value are inherently different approaches to managing projects, but they can complement each other in support of flexibility and bottom-line value. Here are three practical tips to help you bridge the gap between an agile approach and the earned value reports and measurements many organizations require.

As a manger or coach, if you don’t change a pacesetter’s behavior you run a high risk of being held hostage by one person’s abilities--and pay a cost in team productivity. This article is about a pacesetter as a team member on an agile software development team. We will explain what a pacesetter is, why it’s a problem and the effect that a pacesetter has on agile software development.

Agile practices are not intrinsically “value-adding” — they must be aligned to business needs and goals in order to provide true value. By measuring their agility based on compliance with a particular method, organizations may prevent their teams from adapting practices to suit projects with different characteristics and needs.

Agile projects are optimized for different constraints than traditional ones. To truly understand how to design a performance measurement system for agile PM, we need to dig a little deeper into the value system underlying agile methods.

Thomas Jefferson advised to “never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” However, when it comes to Agile-run projects, all potential future requirements should almost always be put off until tomorrow. The focus is on doing only those things that support the current sprint — “today’s functionality.”

Does the use of agile project management require new contract models in order to be successful? Can agile project management be used with traditional fixed-price contracts? Does agile project management require a new type of contract (and if so, what kinds)? Furthermore, wouldn’t a new type of contract discourage the use of agile PM?

There is a huge difference between using Agile practices and being Agile. Here, a chief engineer discusses his organization’s strides in creating an Agile mindset and a customized approach to producing high-quality work in short time frames. The journey offers practical advice and techniques to those getting started or struggling with Agile transformation.

While attending a recent course, this writer learned some simple techniques for better defining the customer and their desires. This article introduces some of the techniques that will help ensure teams know who their customers and users are, who they are not and how to create winning solutions for delivering value.

The Agile2011 Conference drew more than 1,600 attendees to Salt Lake City, where dozens of companies showcased new technology solutions and training offerings. Here is a recap from the busy exhibition floor.

International Institute of Business Analysis and Agile Alliance seek feedback from users of new Agile Extension to BABOK Guide.

Agile adoption outside of software is nothing new--it dates back very close to the origin of today’s agile methods, predating the term “agile”. However, what is new and noteworthy is the rate and scale of non-software agile adoption being witnessed today. Now--as more companies than ever are exposed to agile methods in their IT practices--these methods are being employed beyond the regular IT domain.

What are hyper-productive teams doing differently to achieve such extraordinary results? This article introduces you to the key practices used by Scrum teams around the world to achieve hyper-productive results--practices your team can apply right now.

The project management blogosphere is weighing in on the upcoming Agile certification from PMI. Here’s a recent sampling along with an interview with PMI vice president of IT Frank Schettini, who discusses the development of the certification and what it can offer the profession.

Agile team dynamics are crucial, but most people don't have the time they want or need to read about and practice these topics. Luckily, this list of the Top 10 Team Practices will remind you of some of the basic points.

A rocket won’t overcome gravity's pull without the right trajectory and energy. Likewise, a project needs systems in place at launch to have a chance of soaring. In this excerpt, we set the stage for a successful liftoff, which requires a shared understanding of team roles and objectives. An agile chartering framework can help.

Of all the metaphors one could imagine for an agile project, perhaps the best fit is the jazz performance. With the balance of rules and experimentation, jazz represents the tension, balance and compromises that comprise the agile project...and there is a hidden truth in both.

A new agile procurement process--one that can operate in conjunction with and alongside an agile software development methodology--should significantly improve both the procurement of software vendor’s services and and successful delivery of software projects. This article will explore the underlying principles as well as map the reconciliation points required to harmonize agile development and procurement methods.

Agile thought leader and author Mike Cohn recommends three books for learning more about Agile projects and teams.

A wide variety of technology solutions and services are available to help organizations implement, customize and improve their project portfolio management processes. Here is our April roundup of recent announcements from Daptiv, HP, Oracle, Planview and PowerSteering.

Although the role of the business stakeholder has evolved using agile as a methodology, the business need or pesky constraint typically remains for delivering functionality by a particular date. Hence, project success many times is still measured by delivering functionality by a pre-defined date to meet business goals. Here we offer some suggestions to try if your organization is using an agile methodology--yet expected to deliver a large-scale project that has the same constraints that have existed over time.

Some managers are not accustomed to the management transparency that agile requires--it can push managers past their comfort zone. When that happens, the product and the project team’s process is at risk. Who better to fight for the team than an agile project manager?

Agile methods are all about delivering value. We work on the high-value items first and prioritize the backlog based on business value. Everything is value driven, aiming to maximize value delivered. Risks, on the other hand, are like anti-value--they have potential for value-robbing down time, rework and even project failures. Here we look at how to use Risk-Adjusted Backlogs and Risk Burndowns to illustrate and prioritize risk within agile projects.

There is lots of great information available on how to use agile methods for custom software development projects, but less so for package implementations. Commercial-Off-The-Shelf solutions make up a large percentage of the IT projects undertaken by companies each year, and many organizations are missing out on benefits that an agile package approach can bring.

As agile methods continue to gain in popularity and Project Management Institute events offer more and more agile content, the demand for agile-related offerings has increased substantially. Is this new certification offering a good idea, and what does it mean for you?

New board members will join nine returning members to help guide the organization’s growth in the coming year.

Velocity measures an agile team’s ability to execute, but it often gets misinterpreted or manipulated, which leads to hopeful hunches or downright bad decisions. Because a team's most recent sprint is most indicative of future performance, there's a way to calculate velocity that generates estimates you can use with confidence.

As Agile evolves beyond software development, its people-centric mandate is a natural ally to the social technology revolution transforming today’s enterprises. Here, a leading strategist in the social business landscape shares his thoughts on the interplay of these two movements, including how Kanban and DevOps fit.

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we introduced the agile engineering principles and practices that--when implemented--enable some teams and their respective organizations to quickly build high-quality software that pleases customers. In Part 2, we focus on the tools that support agile engineering and provide you with a guideline for getting started.

The agile experiment has been a failure for many people. Is agile PM just a bad idea? An agile approach to executing a project can be extremely successful and can deliver benefits to customers, team members and the organization as a whole--but it needs to be conducted in the right environment.

With less emphasis on upfront specs and higher rates of change, how are agile projects contracted? Part 2 of this article outlines building blocks for creating agile contracts.

Is your work more industrial-worker based or knowledge-worker based? The way people work together on projects has changed. Have your project management methods kept up?

Rally Software has extended its Agile ALM platform to meet the needs of global organizations with customization options, full traceability with build and source code, and corporate dashboards to create a single source of record for progress and quality.

Despite this global recession, the competitive landscape keeps becoming more urgent and faster paced. You will be expected to keep managing new projects to keep your organization competitive--but will do so with less (and exhausted) resources, tight budgets and more scrutiny for success. How does one meet such challenges and succeed? One of the agile practices tailor made for such an environment is the Lean method.

Here’s our December 2010 roundup of the latest technology solutions and services for project leaders, teams and organizations, including an application to leverage SharePoint … Agile offerings for distributed environments and portfolio-level planning … mobile capabilities for PPM … a free project management tool for small teams ... and more.

Ever stop to ponder all the different PM frameworks that have been developed over the years and which one you should be using in your organization? Is there really one best framework out there? The options are dizzying, so here we take a look at four of them in depth. What can they do for you? Remember, one size does not fit all...

From cross-functional to cross-dysfunctional, a big part of project management is working to grow a high-performing team and then caring for it. Agile concepts around empowered teams and team decision-making support these goals, so there should be no surprise that agile PM aligns well with team development best practices.

A wide variety of technology solutions and services are available to help organizations implement, customize and improve their project portfolio management processes. Here is our August roundup of recent updates and announcements from CA, Daptiv, Innotas, Oracle Primavera, Planview, PowerSteering, Rally and others.

The Agile movement, which emerged from a need to rethink software development projects, has popularized a number of ideas that should be applied more broadly across the PM community. Many Agile principles complement “formal” methods such as earned value management, and can be readily implemented in traditional project environments.

With an integrated application lifecycle management solution, Rally Software addresses the challenges of transitioning to enterprise agile software development, with an emphasis on engaging communities of users and stakeholders.

RMC has partnered with Agile thought-leader Mike Griffiths to create a PMI-ACP exam prep guide, which will be available early next year.

As the paths of traditional and agile project management merge, there are some bumps and scrapes as the two groups come to terms with each other. This article explores the circumstances that ease integration.

There’s an insidious management problem when many teams transition to agile: when the project team is supposed to work on more than one project at a time. Is multitasking killing your agile project?

An anniversary event in Utah celebrates the Agile Manifesto, gathering five of the original authors and others to address future industry challenges.