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Summary: A Working Guide to Agile PM
Review: Agile Project Management is the first book to successfully bring together the theory of complex adaptive systems and the practice of project management in a usable, "how-to" format. The book offers a range of concrete suggestions including (my favorite) how to develop a product vision statement by creating a prototype of the final package. It also offers clear and direct management techniques, including how to establish workable and effective interactions between the product team and the end customer. The "secret" is in keeping the focus of short iterations of deliverables that accommodate change without risking scope spinning out of control. Agile Project Management also helps the project manager with issues of scalability by offering specific suggestions on tailoring the APM approach and by devoting an entire chapter to managing the large team. If you're looking for practical suggestions to how to deliver the best product you can, given the normal constraints of time and budget, then APM is one book you absolutely want to have on your book shelf.
Rating:
Summary: A Working Guide to Agile PM
Review: Agile Project Management is the first book to successfully bring together the theory of complex adaptive systems and the practice of project management in a usable, "how-to" format. The book offers a range of concrete suggestions including (my favorite) how to develop a product vision statement by creating a prototype of the final package. It also offers clear and direct management techniques, including how to establish workable and effective interactions between the product team and the end customer. The "secret" is in keeping the focus of short iterations of deliverables that accommodate change without risking scope spinning out of control. Agile Project Management also helps the project manager with issues of scalability by offering specific suggestions on tailoring the APM approach and by devoting an entire chapter to managing the large team. If you're looking for practical suggestions to how to deliver the best product you can, given the normal constraints of time and budget, then APM is one book you absolutely want to have on your book shelf.
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Summary: Truly inspiring
Review: Highsmith's third book, "Agile Project Management : Creating Innovative Products", is one of those rare books which give me that Elton John feeling of "you took the words right out of my mind". That stated, even though I felt this when reading the book (and with his former books) this is not to say that Highsmith doesn't provide a lot of new insights, it's just that the principles and practices outlined in the book are all in the spirit of those words floating around in my mind, so to speak. Words like 'adaptation', 'camaraderie', 'discipline', 'coaching', 'leadership', 'collaboration', 'communication', 'technical excellence', and more. What I find Highsmith do better than any other Agilist I've read so far, is convey the practical aspects of Agility with the human, social side of collaborative, competitive, exciting work. An inspiring quote on p. 256 says a lot:
"Delivering valuable products is important, and it's critical to project management success. No project team can exist for long without delivering value to its customers. But in the long run, how we deliver, how we interact at work, and how we treat each other as human beings are even more important."This is a book all project managers should read. If you're not a project manager you should still read it; I'm a software developer and I was quite inspired by it. I won't go into the details of Highsmith's proposed APM framework, the principles and practices that make up that framework, but I implore you to get this book and read about them yourselves.
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Summary: Tying together Project Management and Agile Methodologies
Review: In his book, "Agile Project Management - Creating Innovative Products" Jim Highsmith ties together the two worlds of Agile Methodologies and Project Management and in the process provides evolutionary growth in both. The book describes Project Management's place in Agile Methodologies and at the same time provides the next stage of project management growth from Command and Control to what Jim refers to as Leadership - Collaboration. The six principles and 18 practices of Agile Project Management that Jim discusses in the book provide a much needed combination of underlying principles and practical practices that are missing in a great deal of current Project Management thinking. Jim wrote this book in a very readable fashion with short conversations between two project managers at the beginning of each chapter and several examples spread throughout the book. These conversations and examples help to make the material more applicable to the reader. The combination of the principles and practices and the readable style of the book are the characteristics that lead me to rate the book as highly as I do. I highly recommend this book to any project manager who is looking for that next step of growth in their career, or for anyone who is looking for a better understanding of the place in Project Management in agile methodologies.
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Summary: If Only I Had This Book 9 Months Ago!
Review: Jim Highsmith has done again. He has done an amazing job of combining his many years of experience with the Agile principles that he helped craft to develop a very effective project management approach. Better yet, his approach extends beyond software projects to encompass the management of projects of all types. Jim's writing style is a pleasure to read. He speaks to the practitioner using easy to grasp examples and experiential stories that demonstrate his knowledge of real project issues. His APM framework is structured enough to provide guidance, yet flexible enough to adapt to any project. One of my recent data warehousing projects suffered from some of the issues common to traditional project management methods like user expectations management, changing requirements, scope creep, etc. After reading this book I can clearly see how beneficial the APM approach would have been on this project. I will be revising all future approaches to incorporate APM.
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Summary: Highly recommended
Review: Jim Highsmith has managed to write quite a piece of work. "Agile Project Management" contains a valuable catalog of simple practices that combine to support Highsmith's vision of an agile project's phases: Envision, Speculate, Explore, Adapt, and Close.
The book follows the "APM Framework" through each of the phases, illustrating what the phase is all about and enumerates through the practices in the APM toolbox. Also, the beginning of each chapter carries a nice little conversation between two fictional characters which asks the tough questions just when you are about to ask them and gives you a rough answer to guide your thoughts to the right direction -- with the chapters themselves discussing the topic in detail.
This is one of those must-read titles for someone who's serious about improving on his craft.
I have to confess that Highsmith's award-winning "Adaptive Software Development" has been waiting on my bookshelf untouched for a long time. Having read APM -- and thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of it -- I can't help but pick it up soon.
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Summary: An elegant and useful text
Review: Jim Highsmith is one of my favourite "agile" writers. His writing is elegant and to the point. In this book he extends the ideas of agile software development to project management in general. It is bound to be a classic.
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Summary: Extending the Agile Concepts
Review: Jim Highsmith's book Agile Project Management is so important to project and product managers that I have included it as a must read in my syllabus for Adaptive Project Management (MBA Technology Management Program, Westminster College, Salt Lake City, UT).
Jim's belief and practice in extending agile methods and practices into the product management world opens business functions like marketing, finance, sales and obviously product developement/operations to a new way of thinking and operating. What Goldratt did for manufacturing, Jim Highsmith could be doing for intellectual development.
Contact David Spann at cc@ditell.com
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Summary: Real-world project management.
Review: Jim Highsmith's book is a masterful work in unifying and applying the principles and practices of Agile Project Management to all product development projects. What's important about Jim's work is that he marries both the mechanics and dynamics of projects. That is, most books artificially separate the leadership and team aspects of projects from the tools and techniques for getting the job done. Jim integrates both and provides a cohesive model. This one's a must read.
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Summary: How to increase efficiency by improving communication
Review: The agile philosophy of software development and management is the approach made by all busy, efficient people who do not have to conform to rigid rules, "Do the least possible that will satisfy the product constraints." Without question, it is much more efficient than the tentative, bureaucratic and inflexible manner in which so much development is done. Many of the computer students that I teach work at a very large company. On occasion, we engage in discussions about their work environments and the stories about their productivity are amazing. One student told me that the average number of lines of code produced by each programmer was on the order of several hundred a year. In some cases, they have to get managerial approval to make simple changes to the comments.
This is a fundamentally untenable situation in the fast-paced, dynamic world of software development. New hardware and customer demands for new ways to use it require that software developers react much faster than ever. The development of agile processes is a reaction to the sluggishness of constrained software development and it works quite well, although it removes much of the personal security that rigid rules provide.
The best advice in the book is found in a brief segment about communication. A group that is struggling is in a meeting, trying to determine what some of their problems are. A survey is taken and most people agree that the problem is not communication, as a large number of e-mails are passed around each day. Finally, one courageous person raises their hand and notes that while they are passing messages, they are generally not communicating. What they are doing can better be described as chatting. Even though important points are being raised in the messages, they are buried in the filler.
It is that point which I consider to be the most important in this book. Communication between humans is one thing that we all do both well and poorly, and this is true of every type of relationship. It is done well, because we are so good at sending messages, but at times so terribly poor, as we so often send conflicting or incorrect ones. This is also one area where we tend to fool ourselves into thinking we are much better than we really are. In general, the single most significant thing that any group can do to increase their efficiency is to improve communication and that is a point of continuous emphasis throughout the book. It is not always put in those terms, but that is what it really is.
For example, starting on page 66, there is the sequence of statements: "The capability of self-organizing teams lies in collaboration - the interaction and cooperation of two or more people to jointly produce a result . . . The quality of results from any collaborative effort is driven by trust and respect, free flow of information, debate and active participation - bound together by a participatory decision-making process." These statements are just another way to say effective communication.
Independent of whether you are willing to begin using agile methods in your development or not, you will find value in this book. Effective communication between all stakeholders in the project is the real key to increased efficiency, and this book is packed with sound advice on how to do that.
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