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

Use Kanban to maximize efficiency, predictability, quality, and value With Kanban, every minute you spend on a software project can add value for customers. One book can help you achieve this goal: Agile Project Management with Kanban. Author Eric Brechner pioneered Kanban within the Xbox engineering team at Microsoft. Now he shows you exactly how to make it work for your team. Think of this book as “Kanban in a box”: open it, read the quickstart guide, and you’re up and running fast. As you gain experience, Brechner reveals powerful techniques for right-sizing teams, estimating, meeting deadlines, deploying components and services, adapting or evolving from Scrum or traditional Waterfall, and more. For every step of your journey, you’ll find pragmatic advice, useful checklists, and actionable lessons. This truly is “Kanban in a box”: all you need to deliver breakthrough value and quality. Use Kanban techniques to: Start delivering continuous value with your current team and project Master five quick steps for completing work backlogs Plan and staff new projects more effectively Minimize work in progress and quickly adjust to change Eliminate artificial meetings and prolonged stabilization Improve and enhance customer engagement Visualize workflow and fix revealed bottlenecks Drive quality upstream Integrate Kanban into large projects Optimize sustained engineering (contributed by James Waletzky) Expand Kanban beyond software development

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.

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.

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.

As Agile continues to grow in popularity, more organisations are experiencing the pain and frustration associated with any attempt to move from traditional to Agile software development practices. And although that pain often leads to the realisation that success with Agile requires more than simply knowing how to do Scrum, Kanban, or any other methodology, the problem remains that there is a shortage of readily available information on how to create the organisational and cultural change essential to the success of Agile projects. Until now . . . . . . because in this book you will discover proven agile transition strategies that will give you a competitive advantage, more influence and greater control over your career, including: How to get senior management, colleagues, and customers to 'buy' into Agile The art of "Stealth Agile" and how to use it to create organisational change How to avoid the common Agile mistakes that could cost you your job and reputation The three personality types key to the success of any Agile transition How to deal with resistance to Agile software development Which Agile transition strategy is best suited to your organisational size and culture How to build effective Agile teams by modelling on the United States Marine Corps And more . . . Used by the world's top Agile experts to successfully transition organisations from Waterfall to Agile, these proven techniques and strategies will also give you greater job security, quicker promotions, and more money. Who should read this book? This book is for consultants, coaches, managers, product owners, analysts, developers, and testers interested in introducing Agile into their organisation but not sure how or where to get started. Anyone experiencing resistance to Agile at an organisational or individual level will also greatly benefit from reading this book.

Agile Values and Principles for a New Generation “In the journey to all things Agile, Uncle Bob has been there, done that, and has the both the t-shirt and the scars to show for it. This delightful book is part history, part personal stories, and all wisdom. If you want to understand what Agile is and how it came to be, this is the book for you.” –Grady Booch “Bob’s frustration colors every sentence of Clean Agile, but it’s a justified frustration. What is in the world of Agile development is nothing compared to what could be. This book is Bob’s perspective on what to focus on to get to that ‘what could be.’ And he’s been there, so it’s worth listening.” –Kent Beck “It’s good to read Uncle Bob’s take on Agile. Whether just beginning, or a seasoned Agilista, you would do well to read this book. I agree with almost all of it. It’s just some of the parts make me realize my own shortcomings, dammit. It made me double-check our code coverage (85.09%).” –Jon Kern Nearly twenty years after the Agile Manifesto was first presented, the legendary Robert C. Martin (“Uncle Bob”) reintroduces Agile values and principles for a new generation–programmers and nonprogrammers alike. Martin, author of Clean Code and other highly influential software development guides, was there at Agile’s founding. Now, in Clean Agile: Back to Basics, he strips away misunderstandings and distractions that over the years have made it harder to use Agile than was originally intended. Martin describes what Agile is in no uncertain terms: a small discipline that helps small teams manage small projects . . . with huge implications because every big project is comprised of many small projects. Drawing on his fifty years’ experience with projects of every conceivable type, he shows how Agile can help you bring true professionalism to software development. Get back to the basics–what Agile is, was, and should always be Understand the origins, and proper practice, of SCRUM Master essential business-facing Agile practices, from small releases and acceptance tests to whole-team communication Explore Agile team members’ relationships with each other, and with their product Rediscover indispensable Agile technical practices: TDD, refactoring, simple design, and pair programming Understand the central roles values and craftsmanship play in your Agile team’s success If you want Agile’s true benefits, there are no shortcuts: You need to do Agile right. Clean Agile: Back to Basics will show you how, whether you’re a developer, tester, manager, project manager, or customer. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.