Project Management Training > Agile Training

Are you geographically distributed and transitioning to agile? It's time to create your own agile lifecycle. Start with the principles of agile and decide how to create an environment that works for you, your team and your context.

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.

Agile vendors have done a good job providing project managers and product owners with planning and tracking tools. But the primary creators of project deliverables are software developers, and they have consistently been an afterthought. To scale across the enterprise, Agile work processes must embrace the individual contributors doing the actual work.

As part of an agile training session, attendees are shown that while there are many roles that are part of the process, they essentially break down into two basic types: pigs and chickens. Which one are you?

Ever-increasing interest in agile knowledge and best practices drew a record 1,500-plus attendees and thought leaders to the four-day Agile 2008 Conference in Toronto last week. Here’s a recap of news from the exhibition floor.

Agile needs to change the rules of deployment; otherwise, it’s losing effectiveness. If you are going to commit to agile development, then commit to more frequent deployments and everybody wins. Let’s take a look at changing the product deployment model with agile.

Recent alliances, acquisitions and implementations in the world of project and portfolio management.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Agile Leadership Network board president Rob Mac Iver summarizes his highlights at the recent Agile2011 Conference in Salt Lake City, including the event's first Executive Forum.

The traditional ways of adding new tools to the toolkit lack innovation and excitement. Fortunately, you don’t always have to travel or take a computer-based test to add a few new tools to the toolkit. Here we present 21 ways to add new tools to your toolkit as an IT project manager or professional.

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.

Organizations and teams must come to understand why they need agile before choosing a methodology or tool to implement it. A mandate alone will not work. It is the overarching goals, values and principles of Agile that must ultimately guide teams in the adoption and adaptation of its practices.

If you’ve ever been involved in a highly visible project in which major stakeholders are jockeying to position themselves to impose their own agenda, then you would have experienced project partisan politics. And If you are a ScrumMaster on an agile project, there isn't a more important impediment to get out of the way.

Instead of measuring quality, Agile enterprises commit to it by investing in integration and testing, developing a common language around quality, and nurturing motivated, disciplined teams. Ultimately, quality reigns when organizations value it as much as profitability and protect the agile processes that support it.

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?

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.

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.

It’s not enough to manage a good agile project, you have to be seen managing it. In this article, we explore why this is the case--and look at how to provide better visibility on what’s happening on your agile initiative.

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...

Agile methods incorporate many mechanisms for dealing with late-breaking changes that also lend themselves to proactively responding to risks. Here we explore how these methods make effective risk management easier to implement.

Thousands of years ago, humans developed a sophisticated system of navigating at sea--a methodology that is nothing if not agile project management. Their skill and their wisdom, known as wayfinding, have much to teach us as we navigate the challenging waters of the agile project.

Sometimes the true spirit of Agile gets lost in burndown charts, daily standups and endless debates of what it is and isn't. That the Agile Manifesto is uncomplicated and open to interpretation presents both challenges and opportunities. So do what makes sense and continually re-evaluate what that means.

There’s going to be a lot more talk about Agile now that the Project Management Institute has introduced a new certification program for Agile Project Practitioners. Let’s clear up some initial confusion and look at what Agile is and is not, and why you should care.

This will be the first in a series of articles that will look to provide the background of issues involved with managing an agile software development project under a traditionally linear and sequential project procurement process. Software development has been deliberately chosen for the example industry since that’s the domain for which agile is most typically used, but for those using agile in other industry domains, the general issues and proposed solution should work equally well within your industry.

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.

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.

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?

Agile says less is almost always better — less documentation, less process, less intrusion from management. So how can a “less is more” approach be applied to complex projects with larger teams? By creating sub-teams that still work independently, but do much more of one thing: collaboration.

On a mission to debunk more agile myths, this writer arrived at the Eternal Triangle...where issues surrounding people, processes and tools awaited to challenge his thinking. Do you agree or disagree? And what are your assumptions about self-organizing and cross-functional teams?

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.

The acquisition marks an aggressive move by CollabNet into cross-platform, Cloud-based developer services.

Who knew that a seemingly simple effort in rewarding workers would turn into its own agile exercise? An energy company assignment led this writer to another unexpected lesson in evolutionary design and the rewards of prototyping. Read on as we explore one of the core benefits of agile methods.

The first step in scaling agile is to move from partial methods to a full-fledged, disciplined delivery process. The second step is to understand eight scaling factors and determine which are applicable to the range of complexities your project teams face. Here, agile thought leader Scott Ambler presents his scaling model.

Just being an expert on agile and focusing on delivery of “working software” doesn’t necessarily guarantee success. This article shows tips and techniques for those of you struggling with getting your team and your company to adopt agile.

Two years ago, Borland knew it needed to strengthen operational oversight, reduce costs and improve efficiency and quality. Today, the number of software releases has doubled annually, costs are down, and development teams are happier and more productive. What made the difference? Borland got agile.

Distributed project teams are a reality of today’s business world, and the ability to enlist them while upholding Agile principles can bring great advantages as well as real challenges. Our 38-page report looks at those challenges but focuses on the benefits of working with distributed agile teams — and how to achieve them.

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?

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 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.

Collaboration is a common theme throughout many of the leading trends for project management in 2012, as determined by a global panel of senior executives and subject matter experts.

While all project planning should account for the possibility of change, Agile projects live by it. They can also die by it if team members don’t embrace change as part of the process and work collaboratively to manage it.

As much as anything, the agile project is all about the management of ambiguity. In other words, the agile project is about the effective management of questions. For a project to succeed well, we need to see our questions according to three categories.

It's easy to find a million ways that software managers can fail with their teams and their projects. This article prioritizes seven practical leadership tips and techniques that can help build great teams that consistently deliver great projects. And these habits are so simple, you can put them into practice immediately!

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.