The Projecct Manager's Guide to Mastering Agile - Principles and Practices for an Adaptive Approach

Book Abstract

The Project Management Profession is beginning to go through rapid and profound changes due to the widespread adoption of agile methodologies. Those changes are likely to dramatically change the role of project managers in many environments as we have known them and raise the bar for the entire project management profession.

It is not a simple matter of making a binary choice between a totally plan-driven approach and totally adaptive or Agile approach. There are many alternatives between those extremes and it takes a lot of skill to adapt an approach to fit the situation. This book is designed to help project managers with a traditional, plan-driven project management background understand these challenges and to develop a more adaptive project management approach for blending traditional project management with Agile principles and practices in the right proportions to fit a given project and business environment.

Over the past 10-15 years, there has been a very rapid and dramatic adoption of Agile methodologies. This trend has a significant impact on the career direction of project managers who have come from a traditional, plan-driven project management background since there is no formal role for a project manager at the team level in an Agile project. However, in spite of this rapid and sustained proliferation of Agile, there is still a fairly large chasm between the Agile and traditional project management communities:

  • There has been only a limited amount of progress on developing a more integrated approach to project management that embraces both Agile and traditional plan-driven project management principles and practices.
  • Many people seem to see Agile and project management principles and practices as competitive approaches that are in conflict with each other and they are essentially treated as two separate and independent domains of knowledge.
  • There is a lot of polarization between these two communities that is based in some part on myths, stereotypes, and misconceptions about what “Agile” and “Project Management” is.
A major goal of this book is to help project managers understand the impact of Agile on the project management profession and to begin to broaden and expand their project management skills as needed to develop a more integrated approach to adapt to this new environment.


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"The Project Managers Guide to Mastering Agile" book was published in early 2015. It is now available for ordering on Amazon.com!