Agile Project Management: Managing for Success

Modern productivity teams demand modern leadership, one that understands modern development needs, stresses, teams, and other aspects of agile development team dynamics [22]. The purpose of the book is to introduce managers to the new productivity environments, including geographically, culturally, and generationally diverse teams. The Agile development paradigm embodies a set of principles which at first may seem contrary to classical business practices:

For modern managers, one has to adopt a new philosophy, or psychology, for dealing with agile development teams. While process is important to ensure the team delivers quality software that meets customer requirements, it is important to understand that the Agile Method is geared around more of an informal approach to management, while putting more time, effort, and emphasis on flexibility, communication, and transparency between team members and between the team and management. It promotes an environment of less control by managers and more facilitation by managers. The role of the manager takes on a new psychological role, one of removing roadblocks, encouraging openness and communication, and keeping track of the change-driven environment to ensure that the overall product meets in goals and requirements, while not putting too much control on the ebb and flow of the agile development process. Change is no longer wrong, the lack of ability to change is now wrong. Here we discuss the new “soft” people skills required for modern managers, and how they add/detract from modern agile development. How to recognize the skills, how to utilize the skills, and how to build teams with the right “mix” of personalities and soft people skills for effective and efficient development efforts [71].

Success in the modern, agile development era required Agile Managers and Leaders who truly understand what agile development means, how to create agile teams, and how agile teams collaborate, cooperate, and function in various situations, particularly in geographically and culturally diverse environments. In addition, they must understand the agile development cycle vs. the traditional development cycle [15]. Figure 3.1 illustrates the classical program/project development cycle.

Providing an agile development team with tools to be productive goes beyond handing each one of them a laptop with compilers. Communication and collaboration tools, whether face-to-face or geographically diverse, are crucial in modern teams. Here we discuss collaboration tools and other tools that will be crucial today and in the future. We will discuss three major types of productivity tools for agile development programs/projects:

The Earned Value Measurement System (EVMS) has become a mainstay in Commercial and Government groups to measure progress and success of a project. EVMS is espoused to be an effective (albeit subjective) measure, but it does not play well with agile development efforts, due to its requirement of static schedules and work plans [55]. Here we introduce a new paradigm for EVMS that will accommodate and be effective in measuring progress and problems within agile development efforts.

One of the things that must be understood by leadership and management in the future is that just because you deliver a product on time and on budget doesn’t mean the project was an overall success. Delivering a product on budget and on schedule but decimating a development team is not, in the long run, a success for the company. Managers and Leaders must understand all aspects of development teams for long-term success. And while some managers may wonder if they have a role in the new agile development paradigm, the Agile Manager understands that their role is more important than ever to the overall success of the agile development program/project. The Agile Manager must split their time between facilitating each Sprint team to allow them to be as efficient and effective as possible, keeping track of agile productivity metrics, and keeping open and active collaboration and cooperation with the customer in terms of reviewing working software at the end of each Sprint and helping to shape the requirements, capabilities, and needs going forward. These are three paradigm domains that must be attended to by the Agile Manager in order to keep the agile development rhythms sustained throughout the agile development life cycle. A lack of commitment to any of these Agile Management domains or treating any one of them in isolation may result in ineffective Sprint development teams.