Project Management The Agile Way

“…a well written and content rich book. From a teacher's perspective, using this book in an advanced project management seminar challenges students to understand the application of these concepts.” —Alexander Walton, PMP, IT consultant to the University of California at Berkeley Widely acclaimed as one of the top agile books in its first edition, Project Management the Agile Way has now been updated and redesigned by popular demand. This second edition is in a modular format to facilitate training and advanced course instruction, and provides new coverage of agile, such as hybrid agile methods, the latest public sector practices, and a chapter dedicated to transitioning to agile. It discusses the “grand bargain” between project management and business; the shift in dominance from plans to product and from input to output; and introduces new concepts such as return on benefit. Experienced practitioners and students that want to learn how to make agile work effectively in the enterprise should read this book. Individuals preparing for the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)®examination, and training providers developing courses, will find this second edition quite helpful.

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

Agile Practice Guide – First Edition has been developed as a resource to understand, evaluate, and use agile and hybrid agile approaches. This practice guide provides guidance on when, where, and how to apply agile approaches and provides practical tools for practitioners and organizations wanting to increase agility. This practice guide is aligned with other PMI standards, including A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) – Sixth Edition, and was developed as the result of collaboration between the Project Management Institute and the Agile Alliance.

The rules and practices for Scrum—a simple process for managing complex projects—are few, straightforward, and easy to learn. But Scrum’s simplicity itself—its lack of prescription—can be disarming, and new practitioners often find themselves reverting to old project management habits and tools and yielding lesser results. In this illuminating series of case studies, Scrum co-creator and evangelist Ken Schwaber identifies the real-world lessons—the successes and failures—culled from his years of experience coaching companies in agile project management. Through them, you’ll understand how to use Scrum to solve complex problems and drive better results—delivering more valuable software faster. Gain the foundation in Scrum theory—and practice—you need to: Rein in even the most complex, unwieldy projects Effectively manage unknown or changing product requirements Simplify the chain of command with self-managing development teams Receive clearer specifications—and feedback—from customers Greatly reduce project planning time and required tools Build—and release—products in 30-day cycles so clients get deliverables earlier Avoid missteps by regularly inspecting, reporting on, and fine-tuning projects Support multiple teams working on a large-scale project from many geographic locations Maximize return on investment!

Project Management the Agile Way was written for experienced project managers, architects and systems analysts who are comfortable in traditional methods of project management but now need to learn about agile methods for software projects and understand how to make agile work effectively in the enterprise. The methodologies included under the agile umbrella go by many names such as Scrum, XP, Crystal and EVO, to name a few. Project managers will gain practical day-to-day tips and advice on how to apply these practices to mainstream projects and how to integrate these methods with other methodologies used in the enterprise. Key Features: • Offers a review of most of the popular agile and iterative methodologies for project management • Presents practical tips and application advice for how to harmonize agile and iterative methods with mainstream project processes • Describes how earned value can work with non-traditional methods • Explains how to scale agile and iterative methods for enterprise projects • Shows the means to contract and outsource with agile and iterative methods • Provides guidance to build a business case and track post-project benefits

A guide to the Agile Results system, a systematic way to achieve both short- and long-term results that can be applied to all aspects of life.

Learn how to deliver software that meets your clients’ needs with the help of a structured, end-to-end methodology for managing software requirements and building suitable systems Key FeaturesLearn how to communicate with a project’s stakeholders to elicit software requirementsDeal every phase of the requirement life cycle with pragmatic methods and techniquesManage the software development process and deliver verified requirements using Scrum and KanbanBook Description Difficulty in accurately capturing and managing requirements is the most common cause of software project failure. Learning how to analyze and model requirements and produce specifications that are connected to working code is the single most fundamental step that you can take toward project success. This book focuses on a delineated and structured methodology that will help you analyze requirements and write comprehensive, verifiable specifications. You'll start by learning about the different entities in the requirements domain and how to discover them based on customer input. You’ll then explore tried-and-tested methods such as impact mapping and behavior-driven development (BDD), along with new techniques such as D3 and feature-first development. This book takes you through the process of modeling customer requirements as impact maps and writing them as executable specifications. You’ll also understand how to organize and prioritize project tasks using Agile frameworks, such as Kanban and Scrum, and verify specifications against the delivered code. Finally, you'll see how to start implementing the requirements management methodology in a real-life scenario. By the end of this book, you'll be able to model and manage requirements to create executable specifications that will help you deliver successful software projects. What you will learnKick-start the requirements-gathering and analysis process in your first meeting with the clientAccurately define system behavior as featuresModel and describe requirement entities using Impact Mapping and BDDCreate a feature-based product backlog and use it to drive software developmentWrite verification code to turn features into executable specificationsDeliver the right software and respond to change using either Scrum or KanbanChoose appropriate software tools to provide transparency and traceability to your clientsWho this book is for This book is for software engineers, business analysts, product managers, project managers, and software project stakeholders looking to learn a variety of techniques and methodologies for collating accurate software requirements. A fundamental understanding of the software development life cycle (SDLC) is needed to get started with this book. Although not necessary, basic knowledge of the Agile philosophy and practices, such as Scrum, along with some programming experience will help you to get the most out of this book.