Agile is an iterative approach to project management that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer constraints ... Requirements, plans, and results are evaluated continuously so teams have a natural mechanism for responding to change quickly.
Agile is a Mindset:
Ultimately, Agile is a mindset informed by the Agile Manifesto’s values and principles. Those values and principles provide guidance on how to create and respond to change and how to deal with uncertainty.
What about Business Agility?
The two concepts noted to attempt to move Agile “outside of software.” Those efforts have resulted recently in the Business Agility movement. You might say that business agility is a recognition that in order for people in an organization to operate with an Agile mindset, the entire organization needs to support that mindset. Agile software development was never truly Agile until the organization changed its structure and operations to work in an uncertain environment.
In this course:
We will travel to where you serve as a PMO director and guide the transformation of your office from a waterfall-based to an agile-based PMO. And we will explore and discover the differences between waterfall and agile management.
By the end of this course, you will learn to:
Prepare key stakeholders for the changes Agile principles and processes will bring
Work with governance to conduct reviews of agile-based projects and programs
Manage a mixed portfolio
Improve your project management office’s performance using Agile principles and processes.
Key Agile Concepts
Below are a few key Agile concepts, during the course will get more.
User Stories: In consultation with the customer or product owner, the team divides up the work to be done into functional increments called “user stories.” Each user story is expected to yield a contribution to the value of the overall product.
Daily Meeting: Each day at the same time, the team meets so as to bring everyone up to date on the information that is vital for coordination: each team member briefly describes any “completed” contributions and any obstacles that stand in their way.
Personas: When the project calls for it – for instance when user experience is a major factor in project outcomes – the team crafts detailed, synthetic biographies of fictitious users of the future product: these are called “personas.”
Team: A “team” in the Agile sense is a small group of people, assigned to the same project or effort, nearly all of them on a full-time basis. A small minority of team members may be part-time contributors or may have competing responsibilities.
Incremental Development: Nearly all Agile teams favor an incremental development strategy; in an Agile context, this means that each successive version of the product is usable, and each builds upon the previous version by adding user-visible functionality.
Iterative Development: Agile projects are iterative insofar as they intentionally allow for “repeating” software development activities, and for potentially “revisiting” the same work products.
Milestone Retrospective: Once a project has been underway for some time, or at the end of the project, all of the team’s permanent members (not just the developers) invest from one to three days in a detailed analysis of the project’s significant events.
