Agile Project Management Quotes

“The iterative piece of agile can be defined by four key terms: iterative, feature-based, timeboxed, and incremental.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Traditional waterfall methods deliver value at the end of the project, often months or years after the project begins. Agile projects can deliver value quickly and incrementally during the life of the project. Capturing value early and often can significantly improve a project's return on investment, and utilizing iterative, feature-based delivery is the cornerstone practice in making that happen.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“If you want to innovate, you have to iterate!”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Agile Project Management is an execution-biased model, not a planning-and-control-biased model.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“When project leaders focus on delivery, they add value to projects. When they focus on planning and control, they tend to add overhead.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“APM's core purpose of creating innovative new products and services means dealing with constant technological and competitive change, generating novel ideas, and continually reducing product development schedules.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Innovation delivers products that we can barely imagine. Efficiency and optimization are appropriate drivers for a production project, whereas innovation and creativity should drive an exploration-type project. A production mindset can restrict our vision to what appears doable. An exploration mindset helps us explore what seems impossible.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Creating new products and services differs from making minor enhancements to existing ones. The first must focus on innovation and adaptability, whereas the second usually focuses on efficiency and optimization. Efficiency delivers products and services that we can think of. Innovation delivers products that we can barely imagine. Efficiency and optimization are appropriate drivers for a production project, whereas innovation and creativity should drive an exploration-type project. A production mindset can restrict our vision to what appears doable. An exploration mindset helps us explore what seems impossible.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“There are three particularly important issues involved in delivering customer value: focusing on innovation rather than efficiency and optimization, concentrating on execution, and lean thinking.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“The formula for success is simple: deliver today, adapt tomorrow.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Project leaders need to focus on value in several ways: value determination (with product owners), value prioritization (backlog management), and value creation (iterative development).”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Outcomes indicators include product vision, business objectives, and capabilities (high-level product functionality), not detail requirements. These outcome characteristics define a releasable product and quality objectives define a reliable and adaptable (works today, easy to enhance) product. These are the critical value traits, then teams need to strive to meet constraints—scope, schedule, and cost—but as secondary in importance to the value components. In many, if not most, agile projects schedule becomes the most critical constraint and is timeboxed (fixed) and scope varies.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“The agile value "Delivering Value over Meeting Constraints" provides a focus for rethinking how we measure performance on projects.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“We live in an age in which the volume of available information stupefies us. On any relatively interesting subject we can find thousands of Web pages, tens—if not hundreds—of books, and article after article. How do we filter all this information? How do we process all this information? Core values and principles provide one mechanism for processing and filtering information. They steer us in the direction of what is more, or less, important. They help us make product decisions and evaluate development practices.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“The agile value "Delivering Value over Meeting Constraints" provides a focus for rethinking how we measure performance on projects. Although constraints such as cost and time are important, they should be secondary to creating value for customers. All too often, we focus on what is easily measurable and ignore really important characteristics that are harder to quantify. Agile development attempts to change that bias and focus on the most important things, and value is at the top of that list.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“A team can employ agile practices, but it won't achieve the potential benefit of agile development without embracing agile values and principles.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“a good set of questions to determine whether a project leader—or even an individual contributor—has an agile mindset might be, "In what specific ways and with what practices do you focus on value first and constraints last?" "In what specific ways and with what practices do you manage teams rather than tasks?" "In what specific ways and with what practices do you adapt to change rather than conform to plans?" Try these out in your organization to get a feel for your agile maturity.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Agility is principally about mindset, not practices.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“A traditional project manager focuses on following the plan with minimal changes, whereas an agile leader focuses on adapting successfully to inevitable changes.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“In high-performance teams, "the leaders managed the principles, and the principles managed the team.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“If we want to build great products, we need great people. If we want to attract and keep great people, we need great principles”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Agility is more attitude than process, more environment than methodology.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Agility is the ability to balance flexibility and stability”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Agility is the ability to both create and respond to change in order to profit in a turbulent business environment.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“If your goal is to deliver a product that meets a known and unchanging specification, then try a repeatable process. However, if your goal is to deliver a valuable product to a customer within some targeted boundaries, when change and deadlines are significant factors, then reliable Agile processes work better.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“The Agile Project Management principles and framework encourage learning and adapting as an integral part of delivering value to customers.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Agile Project Management -like its lean development counterparts- streamlines the development process, concentrating on value-adding activities and eliminating overhead and compliance activities.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“In fact, in an agile project, technical excellence is measured by both capacity to deliver customer value today and create an adaptable product for tomorrow.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Agile organizations must adhere to the same values as agile teams: • Delivering value over meeting constraints • Leading the team over managing tasks • Adapting to change over conforming to plans Executives and managers need to lead their organizations in living these values and taking actions based on them—and one of the critical areas on which they need to take action is measuring performance in ways that encourage their organizations to embrace agility.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Creativity and innovation are the emergent results of well functioning agile teams.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products