Agile Project Management Quotes

“When applying agile practices at the portfolio level, similar benefits accrue: • Demonstrable results—Every quarter or so products, or at least deployable pieces of products, are developed, implemented, tested, and accepted. Short projects deliver chunks of functionality incrementally. • Customer feedback—Each quarter product managers review results and provide feedback, and executives can view progress in terms of working products. • Better portfolio planning—Portfolio planning is more realistic because it is based on deployed whole or partial products. • Flexibility—Portfolios can be steered toward changing business goals and higher-value projects because changes are easy to incorporate at the end of each quarter. Because projects produce working products, partial value is captured rather than being lost completely as usually happens with serial projects that are terminated early. • Productivity—There is a hidden productivity improvement with agile methods from the work not done. Through constant negotiation, small projects are both eliminated and pared down.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“agile development reflects a product lifecycle approach (continuous delivery of value), rather than a project approach (begin-end). While an individual release of a product can be managed as a project, an agile approach views a release as a single stage in a product’s ongoing evolution.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“The ability to respond to change is good. The ability to create change for competitors is even better. When you create change you are on the competitive offensive. When you respond to competitors' changes you are on the defensive. When you can respond to change at any point in the development lifecycle, even late, then you have a distinct advantage.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Executives, project leaders, and development teams must embrace a different view of the new product development world, one that not only recognizes change in the business world, but also understands the power of driving down iteration costs to enable experimentation and emergent processes. Understanding these differences and how they affect product development is key to understanding APM.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Newtonian versus quantum, predictability versus flexibility, optimization versus adaptation, efficiency versus innovation—all these dichotomies reflect a fundamentally different way of making sense about the world and how to manage effectively within it.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“When uncertainty is low, adaptive approaches run the risk of higher costs. When uncertainty is high, optimizing approaches run the risk of settling too early on a particular solution and stifling innovation.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“An adaptive development process has a different character from an optimizing one. Optimizing reflects a basic prescriptive Plan-Design-Build lifecycle. Adapting reflects an organic, evolutionary Envision-Explore-Adapt lifecycle. An adaptive approach begins not with a single solution, but with multiple potential solutions (experiments). It explores and selects the best by applying a series of fitness tests (actual product features or simulations subjected to acceptance tests) and then adapting to feedback.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“For an agile project, the ensemble includes core team members, customers, suppliers, executives, and other participants who interact with each other in various ways. It is these interactions, and the tacit and explicit information exchanges that occur within them, that project management practices need to facilitate.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“At the core of healthy team relationships is trust and respect.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“The quality of results from any collaboration effort are driven by trust and respect”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“The capability of self-organizing teams lies in collaboration. When two engineers scratch out a design on a whiteboard, they are collaborating. When team members meet to brainstorm a design, they are collaborating. When team leaders meet to decide whether a product is ready to ship, they are collaborating. The result of any collaboration can be categorized as a tangible deliverable, a decision, or shared knowledge.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Get the right people involved, and self-discipline comes more easily. Get the wrong people, and imposed discipline creeps in, destroying trust and respect.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Self-discipline is also built on competence, persistence, and the willingness to assume accountability for results. Competence is more than skill and ability; it's attitude and experience.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Dialogue, discussion, and participatory decision making are all part of building self-discipline.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Effective project leaders focus on people, product, and process—in that order. Without the right people, nothing gets built. Without a laser focus on product value, extraneous activities creep in. Without a minimum process framework, there can be inefficiency and possibly a little chaos.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“In a self-organized team, individuals take accountability for managing their own workload, shift work among themselves based on need and best fit, and take responsibility for team effectiveness. Team members have considerable leeway in how they deliver results, they are self-disciplined in their accountability for those results, and they work within a flexible framework.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Only experience can refine a leader's art. High-uncertainty projects are full of anxiety, change, and ambiguity that the team must deal with. It takes a different style of project management, a different pattern of team operation, and a different type of project leader. I've labeled this type of management leadership-collaboration.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Agile project leaders help their team balance at the edge of chaos—some structure, but not too much; adequate documentation, but not too much; some up-front architecture work, but not too much. Finding these balance points is the "art" of agile leadership.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Authoritarian managers use power, often in the form of fear, to get people to do something their way. Leaders depend for the most part on influence rather than power, and influence derives from respect rather than fear. Respect, in turn, is based on qualities such as integrity, ability, fairness, truthfulness—in short, on character. Leaders are part of the team, and although they are given organizational authority, their real authority isn't delegated top-down but earned bottom-up. From the outside, a managed team and a led team can look the same, but from the inside they feel very different.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“At any organizational level people are leaders not because of what they do, but because of who they are.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“What is the difference between project management and project leadership? Although there is an elusive line between them, the core difference is that management deals with complexity, whereas leadership deals with change.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“In an agile project the team takes care of the tasks and the project leader takes care of the team.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“APM focuses on team management, from building self-organizing teams to developing a servant leadership style. It is both more difficult, and ultimately more rewarding than managing tasks.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Large portions of the productivity gains from agile methods come not from doing things better, but from not doing them at all.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“If you want to be fast and agile, keep things simple. Speed isn't the result of simplicity, but simplicity enables speed.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Project leaders must be champions of technical excellence; they must support and advocate technical excellence while maintaining a watchful eye on other project objectives.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“In my early years of iterative development, I thought timeboxes were actually about time. What I came to realize is that timeboxes are actually about forcing tough decisions.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Driving exploration is critical, but knowing when to stop is also. Product development is exploring with a purpose, delivering value within a set of constraints. Frequent, timeboxed iterations compel the development and product teams and executives to make difficult tradeoff decisions early and often during the project. Feature delivery contributes to realistic evaluations because product managers can look at tangible, verifiable results.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Iterative development, when accompanied with reasonable end-of-iteration reviews—product, technical, process, team—is also self-correcting.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“The feature delivery approach helps define a workable interface between customers and product developers.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products