Agile Performance

Dr. Rico has been a leader in support of major U.S. government agencies for 25 years. He's led many Cloud, Lean, Agile, SOA, Web Services, Six Sigma, FOSS, ISO 9001, CMMI and SW-CMM projects. He specializes in IT investment analysis, portfolio valuation and organizational change. He's been an international keynote speaker, presented at leading conferences, written six textbooks and published numerous articles. He’s also a frequent PMI, APLN, INCOSE, SPIN and conference speaker. For more see davidfrico.com.

  Agile   Cost Management   Estimating   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   Risk Management   Schedule Management   Scheduling  

Exactly how is performance measurement done in the context of agile project management? The bigger question is, “Does performance measurement even apply to agile projects?” Better yet, “What’s an agile project?” An agile project is one that uses the principles of adaptive project management, extreme project management or simply agile methods for planning, executing and controlling the development of a unique product or service. Specific frameworks come to mind, such as release planning from Extreme Programming or Scrum. Other metamodels include Radical Project Management by Rob Thomsett, Agile Project Management by Jim Highsmith, Extreme Project Management by Doug DeCarlo and many others that seem to be emerging in increasing frequency.

So if agile project management is simply a project management framework for agile methods, then the answer is simple, isn’t it? How about earned value management? Isn’t EVM a tried-and-true performance measurement system for project management dating back to the 1950s and 1960s (if not the early American industrial revolution)? We’ll just use EVM for agile projects. Plus, there are a host of basic metrics for IT-intensive projects that have emerged over the last 40 or 50 years as well. How about basic measures of size and complexity? We can use lines of code, function points or cyclomatic …

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