Are You Agile? Three Steps to Get Up to Speed

Jesse Fewell is an author, coach, and trainer in the world of modern management. He founded the original PMI Agile Community of Practice, co-created the PMI-ACP® agile certification and co-authored the Software Extension to the PMBOK Guide®.

  PM Network  

This month, the Project Management Institute will grant its first batch of PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)SM credentials. Considering this milestone, you may be wondering, “Do I have what it takes to be agile? Is passing an exam enough to be successful—or are there other key skill sets I need?”

It’s a good question. There are three critical skills that project leaders must develop for their agile projects to deliver real results.

Take something big and make it small. We’ve all heard the benefits of moving to an incremental project life cycle: Delivering in several smaller increments allows more customer feedback, more frequent lessons learned meetings and less risk at the end of a project. Unfortunately, we are not trained to work this way. For example, we’ve been trained to believe that all the graphic design elements need to be finished before product developers can see it, or that the full hardware platform has to be production-ready before features can be built.

An effective agile project leader needs to encourage developers to start applying an unfinished graphic design, for example, to verify that it will fit. Challenge engineers to use the prototype operating system to verify system interfaces. Your teams will complain about rework and dependencies, but don’t give in. Smaller project increments happen …

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