The Team’s The Thing

With an extensive background in health insurance and financial service companies, Brian's current focus is supporting teams as they adopt Agile and lean practices and deal with the challenges of organizational change. He is an expert helping foster better relations between business and technology to achieve more response projects and better results. He is one of the founding members of the PMI Agile Virtual Community of Practice and the creator of the annual Agile Games conference in Boston.

  Agile   Leadership   ProjectsAtWork  

Project managers pursuing an entrepreneurial, Agile approach to get things done will find that setting the stage to properly support a team is the most challenging and rewarding activity they can undertake. In the process, their value goes far beyond tactical execution.

Ten years ago, a series of software methodologists crafted what we now refer to as the Agile Manifesto. In it, they articulated the values they found most important when developing software. They observed that, in the highly uncertain domain of developing software, the mentality of detailed contracts, inflexible plans, and complex documentation did not serve their customers well. Thus, they advocated focusing on people, collaboration, responsiveness and building software.

In the past ten years, these values and practices have gained massive popularity — so much so that they are being applied to numerous practices beyond pure software development, and now project managers are considering what these values and practices mean for their craft.

While many projects do not involve software development, they do deal in the domain of complex endeavors with large amount of uncertainty and potential for changing circumstances. In fact, these are the types of situations that require good project management.

So how do these values manifest themselves in what we would call an “Agile” …

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