Being Agile In A Waterfall World

"In this book I argue that any leader can begin the journey for their organization toward agility, even if the entire organization is operating in a traditional, sequential, waterfall approach to delivery of new products and services. I assert that the move from command and control management to servant leadership and trusting people is tantamount to the shift from the fields to the factories in the Industrial Revolution. I stress that the most important thing you can do as a leader to move your organization forward is to encourage your people to apply the underlying values, principles and purposes of what has become known as agile"--Page 2

This book goes beyond the paint by numbers approach, transcending the "how" of project management to the "what" and "why," which is critical for leaders of change. — Dr. Joel B. Carboni, President and Founder, GPM Global and President, IPMA-USA Project Management beyond Waterfall and Agile presents a flexible, universal, and integrated three-dimensional model for managing projects, the Customizable and Adaptable Methodology for Managing ProjectsTM (CAMMPTM ). By tailoring and customizing the model to a specific industry or organization and by adapting it to a function or project classification, this model can be used to manage any project. CAMMPTM can also be used both in a traditional or an Agile environment. CAMMPTM integrates leading concepts on competence, processes, and sustainability. The model’s three dimensions are project lifecycle, project management processes, and, finally, competence, sustainability, and best practices. The book explains how to integrate these dimensions to manage a project across the three dimensions and the project stages. CAMMPTM is a stage-gate process, which is vital for project success. The current state of practice in project management is not sustainable. The root causes of this problem include a lack of standardized processes, missing methods or methodological approaches, and no real organizational system for managing projects. This book introduces a system to address these shortcomings. It focuses on the elements of this system, which is a practical and systematic methodological approach for managing and delivering all types of projects. CAMMPTM integrates the best learning from the various global associations in the field. The book distills the experience and knowledge of a practitioner working in different roles for more than three decades on various types of projects of all sizes and complexities. It is a practical book by a practitioner writing for practitioners.

This book is a practical guide for new agile practitioners and contains everything a new project manager needs to know to get up to speed with agile practices quickly and sort out the hype and dogma of pseudo-agile practices.The author lays out the general guidelines for running an agile project with the assumption that the project team may be working in a traditional environment (using the waterfall model, or something similar). Agile Development in the Real World conveys valuable insights to multiple audiences: For new-to-agile project managers, this book provides a distinctive approach that Alan Cline has used with great success, while showing the decision points and perspectives as the agile project moves forward from one step to the next. This allows new agile project managers or agile coaches to choose between the benefits of agile and the benefits of other methods. For the agile technical team member, this book contains templates and sample project artifacts to assist in learning agile techniques and to be used as exemplars for the new practitioner’s own project. For the Project Management Office (PMO), the first three chapters focus on portfolio management. They explain, for the agilists’ benefit, how projects are selected and approved, and why projects have an inherent "shelf-life" that results in hard deadlines that may seem arbitrary to traditional technical teams. What You Will Learn: How and why the evolution of project management, from PM-1 (prescriptive) to PM-2 (adaptive) affects modern 21st century project management. How sociology (stakeholder management), psychology (team dynamics), and anthropology (organizational culture) affect the way software is developed today, and why it is far more effective A clear delineation of what must to be accomplished by all the roles (PM, BA, APM, Developer, and Tester), why those roles are needed, and what they must do Step-by-step guide for a successful project based on studies and the author’s own experiences. Specific techniques for each role on the development team, both in the pre-iteration and iteration cycles, of product development. The appendices contain templates that the team could use or modify to tailor their own agile processes specific to the team, project, and organization.

Break the Old, Waterfall Habits that Hinder Agile Success: Drive Rapid Value and Continuous Improvement When agile teams don’t get immediate results, it’s tempting for them to fall back into old habits that make success even less likely. In Being Agile, Leslie Ekas and Scott Will present eleven powerful techniques for rapidly gaining substantial value from agile, making agile methods stick, and launching a “virtuous circle” of continuous improvement. Drawing on their experience helping more than 100 teams transition to agile, the authors review its key principles, identify corresponding practices, and offer breakthrough approaches for implementing them. Using their techniques, you can break typical waterfall patterns and go beyond merely “doing agile” to actually thinking and being agile. Ekas and Will help you clear away silos, improve stakeholder interaction, eliminate waste and waterfall-style inefficiencies, and lead the agile transition far more successfully. Each of their eleven principles can stand on its own: when you combine them, they become even more valuable. Coverage includes Building “whole teams” that cut across silos and work together throughout a product’s lifecycle Engaging product stakeholders earlier and far more effectively Overcoming inefficient “waterations” and “big batch” waterfall thinking Getting past the curse of multi-tasking Eliminating dangerous technical and project debt Repeatedly deploying “release-ready” software in real user environments Delivering what customers really need, not what you think they need Fixing the root causes of problems so they don’t recur Learning from experience: mastering continuous improvement Assessing whether you’re just “doing agile” or actually “being agile” Being Agile will be indispensable for all software professionals now adopting agile; for coaches, managers, engineers, and team members who want to get more value from it and for students discovering it for the first time.

Projects in the near future will be managed with a hybrid of Agile and traditional waterfall processes to better address the speed to market, product innovation, and financial challenges that organizations face. The project managers who learn how to merge Agile with Waterfall methodologies first will gain a huge career advantage over those who lag behind. This engaging and highly instructive guide covers what Agile is, and how and when it is appropriate to blend it into your projects. Agile Practices for Waterfall Projects will help new and experienced project managers, stakeholders, and students of the discipline to proactively prepare for and ensure their future success. This valuable resource also contains all the terms and concepts needed for those planning to take the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)® exam.

"Binding: PB"--

Being Agile is your roadmap to successfully transforming your organization to an Agile culture. Veteran agile coach Mario Moreira teaches new adopters how to implement a robust Agile framework to derive from it the maximum business benefit in terms of customer value, revenue, and employee engagement. Agile is a ubiquitous watchword in the corporate world, but only a minority of companies understand and practice what they pay lip service to. Too many content themselves with half-baked approximations such as Fragile (fragile Agile), ScrumBut (Scrum but not the practices), and Scrum Fall (mini-waterfalls in the sprints). Moreira shows maturing early adopters how to bridge the chasm between going through the motions of doing Agile and genuinely being Agile. After a high-level synopsis of Agile’s values and principles, methodologies (including Scrum, Kanban, DSDM, Leam, VFQ, and XP), and roles, Moreira plunges into the nitty-gritty of how to apply the ready, implement, coach, and hone (RICH) deployment model to all phases of a project in such a way as to embody and inculcate agile values and principles at the team level and promote agile transformation across your organization's culture.

The Go-To Resource for Large-Scale Organizations to Be Agile Rather than asking, “How can we do agile at scale in our big complex organization?” a different and deeper question is, “How can we have the same simple structure that Scrum offers for the organization, and be agile at scale rather than do agile?” This profound insight is at the heart of LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum). In Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS, Craig Larman and Bas Vodde have distilled over a decade of experience in large-scale LeSS adoptions towards a simpler organization that delivers more flexibility with less complexity, more value with less waste, and more purpose with less prescription. Targeted to anyone involved in large-scale development, Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS, offers straight-to-the-point guides for how to be agile at scale, with LeSS. It will clearly guide you to Adopt LeSS Structure a large development organization for customer value Clarify the role of management and Scrum Master Define what your product is, and why Be a great Product Owner Work with multiple whole-product focused feature teams in one Sprint that produces a shippable product Coordinate and integrate between teams Work with multi-site teams