Agile Project Management for Dummies

There is so much 'stuff' out there wfitten about agile, especially since the Government Digital Service made it the sexy civil service shibboleth for 2012. I have had to read so much rubbish from born again civil service project managers who now have to drop the words scrum and sprint into every highlight report so that the suits upstairs can feel good about our cutting edge. Anyways this is an excellent summary and will save you reading hundreds of rubbish powerpoint slides from desperate training organisations offering 'insight' into the new way of working. Beautifully structured which enables you to get to relevant and useful facts real fast. I use this all the time...but I don't tell anybody about it...so they think I'm really clever...the fools! Get it and save time and effort.

As a director of finance I was given responsibility for a new CRM project. Our IT team were already using Agile and I needed to catch up. These books are very well laid out to ensure you get the key points while providing more detail for further reading. Very happy.

This book will give you a summary of Agile Project Management techniques and best practices.If you want to gain a quick understanding of what is needed, this is the book for you. If you want to get a deep understanding -- surprisingly, this is also the book for you. It manages to do both very well. It skips on a lot of analytical details and gets you to the heart of what you need quickly.

The "Big bang development" approach of one-shot product creation and excessive planning assumes you can estimate a destination of features by locking them in with unreasonable deadlines, which appears on the surface to be a good thing in forcing greater focus to deliver the product all in one go; however such ventures usually tend to become all-or-nothing with 24 per cent cancelled outright or 44 perc challenged between proposal and execution (Standish Group). The stakes are even higher on costlier projects as everything happens at the end in an unforgiving 'fixed' real world. For example, ever ask what happened at Brandenburg Airport that no doubt started with the promise of certainty of a future but ended up with limited knowledge of the end state as the project became grounded for many years?Typically in an over-bureaucratic environment reality gets lost in the plan: the luxury of planning the work then working the plan as a ticked box exercise takes over from Moltke's contact with the enemy. This situation is exacerbated by politically mediocre scrutiny and inflexibility to prioritise high-risk features for prototyping at the start of the project. In the case of Brandenburg, Airport, designers were allowed to defy the laws of physics to redirect smoke exhausted out of the roof through the basement below the structure for "aesthetic" reasons, but at the far greater overall cost, and is it turned out, much jeopardy to the project.Another concession to an over-bureaucratic environment can be limited opportunities for human interfacing which Agile obviates. Tom Wujec's marshmallow, spaghetti and tape team-building experiments showed that adults engaged in power play at the start of a task, tried to then determine a pecking order before turning their attention towards an inconceivable 'perfect' plan; whereas the children group naturally iterated to innovate (and fail) fast. Incredibly, they were better able to handle a mixed team of personalities and skills too. Another type of group also performed equally well to the children, those skilled at giving orders teaming up with those who could take them. Nevertheless, successful as command and control regimes often are - some would say for all the wrong reasons - an interesting fact remains: a group of children consistently gave the adults a run for their money and often outsmarted them in terms of creativity of results in fulfilling the brief, i.e. their structures remained upright!There is an in-depth explanation of the Agile Manifesto that celebrates individuals and interactions over processes and tools (people) to allow for the successful accommodation of new ideas and requirements. Agile foregrounds working software not comprehensive documentation (the product) and proceed to demonstrate with artefacts (user stories) and events versus documents and meetings. There is no need for status reports and meetings as information is visually available on Kanban boards etc. Agile promotes customer collaboration - not the kind of contract negotiation (communications) that causes bad blood when "closing out" - and it is dynamic in responding to change over time following a plan by being 'situational.' This often means using JIT (just-in-time) strategies with utmost flexibility, such as issuing the first release with MMF (minimum marketable features), i.e. only very high priority requirements.In terms of the 12 Principles Agile delivers early business value by prioritising artefact backlogs, product increments and reducing 'scope bloat' (what you think you want and need). In an Agile environment, everyone works together: Stakeholders are involved, Mentors experienced, Champions passionate, Product Owners decisive, Scrum Masters have clout and Development Teams are versatile. Agile builds around motivated individuals through face-to-face conversation and work sustainably. They are encouraged to continually improve in self-organising teams that promote co-functionality (the same task seen from different angles, not multi-tasking) and 'ebb-and-flow' servant leadership in a culture of mature ownership and team reflection.This mixture of combined talents I believe accounts for Agile's success, with a Product Owner as overseer, a Scrum Master who acts as an empiricist, and a Development Team of innovators. These roles lend certain advantages to socially and technically complicated undertakings by pooling collective resources and possessing requisite variety.However, the fact remains that Agile PM For Dummies draws on similar material to Scrum For Dummies though here presented in a much more systematic ie. bullet point fashion, which can come across as fairly rote and uninspiring. If this is your preferred learning style then great. For me, the message got lost somewhere around 'simplicity' of focus through continual prioritising; but certainly, you cannot question Layton's communication fidelity and 'transparency' through continual feedback;As one final note of caution from the author: beware of Cargo Cult Agile that exists in all but name only.

Wanted to brush up on my agile skills and dummies books are very good for reference and you can dip in and out of them. As with all dummies books if you try to read them from cover to cover they get very repetitive.

Great book for an agile beginner but also for any junior or mid-level agile professional (software development as well as other areas) who needs to refresh their knowledge in agile. Very clear statements and examples. Good additional on-line material. Very easy to read and follow with some good humour in some examples and scenarios.

If you are thinking of doing Agile PM then this is a good start. I would have liked to see sections on MoSCOW perhaps to help the backlogs but that can be easily obtained. I will be using this as a handy reference now.

Not perfect but very useful as a guide