The Agile Methodology for Project Risk Managers

This video will help you understand better the content of the other courses that will form this Agile Project Management - The PMI-ACP (Agile Certified Practitioner) Certification Program.

You might know this. I’m adding it to any course in the introductory section. But, just in case some suggestions to improve your learning.

Learning objectives, course content, course structure, and course delivery

If you have followed a traditional project management approach and find yourself spending a lot of time fine tuning the design to accommodate changing requirements, you may want to consider a different approach. In this course, you will be introduced to agile project management, including the core values and principles outlined by the Agile Manifesto.

This lesson will be very short and very clear. You are going to learn here what Agile project management means. This we can call the starting point, and with this we begin our course on Agile Project Management Essentials. And, please don’t expect more than the essentials in this course, the other courses that form the mentioned Certification Program will come with the rest of the information.

Agile project management has several key characteristics:

• it relies on cross-functional teams that work in short iterations, and 
• uses an incremental approach to development;
• it also focuses on business priorities and customer value, and 
• strives for continuous improvement.

Benefits of agile project management in relation to more traditional management approaches are that it can:

• reduce risk, 
• speed up delivery, 
• generate more value, and 
• reduce the cost of making changes.

In 2001, representatives of different agile software development methodologies met to promote the development of the agile approach. They called themselves the Agile Alliance and drafted the Agile Manifesto which outlines basic values for agile development. In turn, these values are underpinned by specific principles.

The authors of the Agile Manifesto are Kent Beck, Mike Beedle, Arie van Bennekum, Alistair Cockburn, Ward Cunningham, Martin Fowler, James Grenning, Jim Highsmith, Andrew Hunt, Ron Jeffries, Jon Kern, Brian Marick, Robert C. Martin, Steve Mellor, Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland, and Dave Thomas.

Twelve agile principles describe the four agile values in more detail. The first six principles are:

• to focus on satisfying the customer
• welcoming change
• delivering working software frequently
• ensuring that business people and developers work together
• motivating the individuals involved in development, and 
• using face-to-face communication whenever possible

A development model is a guide to the development process, to help ensure that no important aspects of development are overlooked. Traditionally, development models were highly defined and linear. The trend now is toward more empirical models that include iterative and incremental processes, to provide greater flexibility.

The waterfall (also known as traditional) model divides the development process into five phases:

• Requirements
• Design
• Development
• Testing
• Deployment

Traditionally, a project plan is a document that helps project managers execute and control the phases of a project. It clarifies a project's objectives and how they can be achieved. Information included in a project plan typically includes the project's scope, cost, and schedule, as well as its activities, deliverables, milestones, and resources.

The traditional iron triangle of constraints identifies three main types of constraints on the success of a project - scope, cost, and schedule. Change to any one of these constraints will affect the others. The quality of a project depends on satisfying all three constraints.

After completing this section, you will be able to: understand characteristics of agile project management, distinguish between primary and secondary agile values, recognize agile principles...

Based on the Agile Project Management model derived by Jim Highsmith, agile project management can be divided into five phases:

• Envisioning
• Speculating
• Exploring
• Adapting, and 
• Closing.

Like the agile approach, traditional project management can be described in terms of five key phases. These are:

• Initiating,
• Planning
• Executing
• Monitoring and Controlling, and 
• Closing. 

Each of these differs in specific ways from the corresponding agile phase.

Agile development avoids the prescriptive, plan-oriented approach associated with traditional project management, and makes use of self-organizing teams. However, it is a common misconception that agile projects don't require project management.

Project management is still necessary. But, the traditional responsibilities of the project manager may be handled differently and possibly be spread out across members of the agile project team.

You can implement agile project management using different methodologies. Although every agile methodology has different characteristics, they all maintain essential agile principles. Three widely used agile methodologies are:

• Scrum
• Extreme Programming - also known as XP, and 
• Lean development

Other agile methodologies include the Crystal family of methodologies, Feature Driven Development, or FDD, Dynamic Systems Development Method - or DSDM - as well as Adaptive Software Development - also known as ASD. The methodology you choose should depend on what will best suit a particular project.

After completing this section, you will be able to: compare the phases of traditional project management with those of the agile framework, understand how a project manager's responsibilities ...

Section project (optional)

After completing the first part of the course - called The Agile Approach -, you are now able to:

• understand the characteristics of agile project management, and why is this important;
• distinguish between primary and secondary agile values, and how this might help you in your work;
• recognize and apply agile principles in your projects;
• recognize and use the differences between defined and empirical methodologies; and
• compare the agile triangle of constraints with that of traditional project management.

Section wrap-up and conclusions.

Wise project leaders are able to examine their own situations and determine which agile practices to adopt given the nature of their projects, organizations, and teams.

Organizations across the world are using agile project management to get superior results. But this doesn't mean that the move from traditional to agile project management will be easy. One of the main challenges is overcoming the various myths and misconceptions about what an agile approach involves.

The approach you adopt doesn't have to be purely agile or purely traditional. Instead of viewing different project management methodologies as black and white, you should view them as points along a continuum, with many shades of gray.

Agile development requires just enough documentation. Creating unnecessary documentation is considered a waste of valuable development time.

Although agile methodologies were first geared towards software development projects, they're not just development methodologies. Instead they're project management methodologies.

Planning in Agile looks very different. In agile development, there's no work breakdown structure or time-phased and resource-assigned task list. Instead Agile uses just-in-time planning.

Various misconceptions about agile methodologies may prevent or hinder their adoption. Learn agile project management to apply it effectively.

Learn agile project management and correct common misconceptions.

Using an agile methodology may have a tremendous impact on a project. It can shorten development cycles, improve quality and efficiency, lower costs, and result in better customer satisfaction.

Some project types are more suitable for agile development than others. An agile approach is especially suitable when a project is characterized by a high level of internal uncertainty, a scope that isn't well- defined at the start of a project, and a product that benefits from ongoing customer feedback.

The structure of an organization is one of the key factors that determines how easily it will be able to transition into using an agile methodology.

The nature of the existing project management processes in an organization will help determine how easily a team can adapt to using an agile methodology. Generally, the more flexible and informal these processes are, the easier a team will find the transition.

The nature of your organization's industry is an external factor that may affect the suitability of an agile approach. Industries that are relatively stable tend to focus on updating or improving products that have already been tried and tested. They have a steady customer base and know their product and competition.

It's likely to be easier for an organization to adjust to an agile approach if its structure is already collaborative and if its culture encourages trust, openness, responsibility, and adaptability. 
It's also likely to be easier if the organization's existing project management processes are informal and flexible, if the project team is small, and if team members are suitably skilled and work in the same location. 

Determine whether your organization should adopt agile practices and identify factors to consider when deciding whether to adopt agile practices.

It's not always appropriate to adopt a fully agile approach to project management. Organizations might not be ready to commit to the level of change and training that this requires.

Different agile methodologies use different techniques for defining requirements, and project teams may customize these to suit their needs.

Another general agile practice you can adopt is iterative development with incremental delivery. Instead of completing all project work and then delivering the result to the customer for review, you focus on completing regular, short bursts of work and delivering the results to the customer at the end of each cycle.

A final agile practice that can benefit most organizations and projects is frequent, open communication among project team members, and between the team and the project customer.

Recognize the key principles of agile practices.

Agile methodologies don't generally prescribe exactly how you should manage a project. Instead they define principles that you can interpret and implement in your own way. By introducing these principles gradually into your workplace, you can transform the way your project teams operate.

Although lean principles can form the basis of an agile mindset and are generally easy to implement, they're not the only core principles used in an agile approach. Once you've introduced these principles and your team is familiar with them, you can begin introducing other agile principles.

Understand the principles behind an agile mindset.

An important step in the process of adopting agile practices is to obtain buy-in from stakeholders in your organization. Switching from a traditional approach to project management to an agile one involves making significant changes – and change can be difficult for people to accept.

When communicating the need for change to stakeholders, you should focus on explaining the weaknesses of the traditional – or waterfall – model your organization currently uses.

The next step in convincing others of the need to move from a traditional approach to a more agile one is to explain the potential benefits for the organization. When doing this, you can focus on three main benefits – reduced risk, improved control, and improved communications.

Statistics that prove the effectiveness of Agile practices to review some statistics you can use when explaining the benefits of adopting an agile approach.

When you tell stakeholders about agile project management, you should be open about the risks or pitfalls involved. This gives the message that you're not trying to convince them to use agile practices, but that the organization's interests are a priority and that you want them to make an informed decision.

Obtain buy-in from stakeholders to implement agile practices.

Course project (optional)

Course wrap-up, learning objectives review and next steps.

Adopting agile management

There are two main parts: one is called Managing a scrum project and the other The Scrum Process in Action.

The term "scrum" originates from the rugby formation, in which a team's players work together to gain possession of the ball. The agile methodology of Scrum borrows this term to describe a framework of project management processes and techniques. Scrum enables project teams to develop complex products quickly and efficiently, to adapt to change, and to regularly deliver value to customers in the form of working products. 

The product owner is usually a customer representative, whose main focus is to represent the interests of the customer throughout the development process. The product owner measures how well a project performs in terms of return on investment, or ROI. 

In a Scrum team, the Scrum Master is the expert on all Scrum-related issues and ensures that everyone works according to Scrum principles and practices. He or she should also shield the development team from external processes and control, so they can fully concentrate on development. The Scrum Master may be a member of the development team.

A Scrum team usually consists of five to nine individuals who share the responsibility for developing a product and delivering it to the product owner at the end of each sprint. The optimal team is self- organizing and cross-functional. 

You're working as a Scrum Master on a project that involves developing tracking software for a transport company. 

In the Scrum approach, effective communication is vital for ensuring that a Scrum team understands customer requirements, and that development team members can work together efficiently to solve complex problems.

The role of Scrum meetings is to ensure communication flows smoothly between the different stakeholders and team members. There are five types of Scrum meetings – the sprint planning meeting, the daily standup meeting, the Scrum of Scrums, the sprint review meeting, and the sprint retrospective

The core of Scrum, originally referred to as the "game" by its creators, describes how to prepare and run Sprints. While not officially described as such in the Scrum guide, the phases of a Scrum project cycle could be considered and are sometimes described as pre-game, game, and post-game.

The game phase refers to the sprint, or development, phase. This is when the development team plans each sprint and proceeds to create functioning product deliverables, also called potentially shippable product increments. 

The work needed after a sprint or series of sprints to release the product, is sometimes referred to as the post-game phase. 

Understand Scrum team roles, guidelines for effective stakeholder communication, project activities and phases in the Scrum development process

At the start of a new Scrum project, some initial planning and design must take place in order to define a project goal and product backlog for the project. 

Once the product owner has compiled project requirements, the development team reviews the backlog and creates a high-level design for the product to be developed. 

The game phase is where the core Scrum practices exist and where the bulk of the work is done. The development team plans each sprint, meets regularly, and creates functioning deliverables. And at the end of each sprint, it delivers the results to the customer, or a customer representative, for review. The process is iterative, with a product developed incrementally over multiple sprints. 

During the course of a sprint, the members of a Scrum team meet to discuss task progress and any issues that are preventing tasks from being completed.  

Ongoing testing and the adaptation based on test results is a key principle of most agile methodologies, including Scrum. During the game phase of the Scrum development process, this principle is implemented in two ways – through unit testing and sprint reviews.

After each sprint review meeting, the Scrum Master conducts a sprint retrospective with the development team to discuss how the sprint went and how it could have been improved. This helps the team formulate best practices it can apply during the next sprint, in keeping with the agile principle of continuous improvement. 

At any point in a project, it's important to know how the project is progressing. That way, team members can make necessary adjustments – and other stakeholders can verify that everything is on track. Scrum teams use various highly visual tools to track their progress during each sprint. These include burndown charts and various progress charts. 

As well as burndown charts, a Scrum team may use various progress charts - to track its progress in completing the tasks in each sprint

Both burndown charts and progress charts let you compare actual and estimated values, and both provide a quick, highly visual way to track progress. 

When practicing Scrum we can make the sprint backlog visible by putting it on a Scrum task board. Team members update the task board continuously throughout the sprint; if someone thinks of a new task (“Test the snark code on Windows 8.1”), she writes a new card and puts it on the wall.

As well as charts, you can use various metrics to track and report on the progress of a Scrum project. All visual ways to track progress, within the sprint or on project level, are called progress monitors.

At the start of a new Scrum project, some initial planning and design must take place in order to define a project goal and product backlog for the project. 

Section project (optional)

Course wrap up and conclusions.

Course wrap-up and conclusions

Welcome to the 4th course of the Agile Project Management - The PMI-ACP (Agile Certified Practitioner) Certification Program. This one is focused on Agile Planning and more precisely on Project Initiating and Requirements Gathering.

Project planning involves thinking about how to complete a project within a certain timeframe, usually with defined stages and with designated resources. The success of a project will depend in part on the effort and skill you apply during planning.

Project planning occurs at various levels, each providing a different degree of detail and occurring at different times in the project development life cycle.

Agile project planning is cyclical and ongoing, with different types of planning repeated throughout the project life cycle. Project planning is usually either date-driven or feature-driven. In a date-driven - or time-boxed - project, the release date is set but the set of features that will be included in the product release is uncertain.

A project team is updating the web site of QuickTravel, an outdoor adventure company. The team's instructions are to change the site's look and feel, and to add search, reservation, and payment tools. The team knows what to build, but it is not sure why the customer has requested the changes or which functionality is the most important. As a result, the team runs over budget and develops a product that doesn't fully align to the customer's business objectives.

Recognize the levels of agile planning, understand the benefits of having a plan for an agile project, and identify activities that take place during the different phases of agile planning

Whereas traditional project management is plan-driven, agile planning is value-driven. Value in this context refers to the financial worth of a project to the customer. The purpose of a business case is to confirm that a project will create value for the customer right from the start. A business case addresses questions about a proposed project's economic, technical, operational, and political impact on the customer.

For an agile project, a product vision describes how a product can capitalize on the opportunities and fulfill the goals outlined in the business case. It should provide all stakeholders, including developers, with a common understanding of what's required, without limiting the team's creativity in finding solutions.

Some may think that with an agile methodology, the customer can simply take an "I'll know it when I see it" approach to specifying what's required. However, this would make planning and estimation nearly impossible.

Agile teams are highly responsive to changes in customer expectations and market conditions. However, an agile project isn't without boundaries. Time and money, for example, aren't unlimited - so there have to be some limits on what can change, and the changes can't go on forever.

A project manager defines the scope of a traditionally managed project using a work breakdown structure, or WBS. An agile team, however, defines and manages scope using techniques for capturing requirements, such as use cases.

Use cases provide a big-picture overview of a system and of a project's scope. They can, however, be quite detailed and may not be very suitable for use in planning and estimating. An alternative technique, possibly used in addition to a high-level use case, involves breaking down project requirements into user stories. Each user story describes a specific, required functionality, which is defined from a user's perspective. Together all the user stories for a project provide a detailed description of the project's requirements.

Understand the essential elements of a business case, identify the elements of product vision, analyze an example of a use case, and develop examples of user stories.