Books and Papers

Books

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

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.

Read an abstract of this book

Managed Agile Development - Making Agile Work for Your Business

Many businesses make the mistake of force-fitting their business and projects to some kind of predefined project methodology (Agile or Waterfall) thinking that it is an either/or choice between those two extremes. Many times the best approach is to go in the other direction and fit the methodology (or combination of methodologies) to the business. Managed Agile Development will show you how to blend Agile and traditional plan-driven project management principles and practices in the right proportions to fit your business environment to experience the benefits of an Agile approach combined with some of the benefits of a more plan-driven methodology specifically designed to fit your business needs.

This book has been replaced by The Project Manager's Guide to Mastering Agile (See above)

Making Sense of Agile Project Management - Balancing Control and Agility

Balancing the need for becoming more agile with the traditional project management emphasis on control and predictability is a very strategic issue for all businesses that rely on effective project management throughout many areas of their business. This book examines this apparent conflict and resolves some of the misconceptions behind it and discusses what this trend means to Project Managers and the project management profession.

Papers

The Next Generation of Project Management

This is a feature article that was published in the VersionOne Chronicles in November of 2014.

The concept of Agile Project Management is very rapidly evolving and will have a significant impact on the project management profession and cause us to rethink many things we have taken for granted about what “project management” is for a long time. However, we are in the very early stages of that transformation and there is a lot of confusion that exists in today’s world between the Agile and traditional plan-driven Project Management communities and many people see them as competitive and mutually-exclusive alternatives. It’s no wonder that project managers and others might be confused by all of this!

This paper will help you unravel the confusion that exists and see Agile and traditional plan-driven project management principles and practices in an entirely new light as complementary to each other rather than competitive.

Check Out Our Blog Site at ManagedAgile.com
(Over 60 articles on Agile Project Management)
View Earlier Books and Papers on Business Excellence