Agile Project Management Quotes

“Adaptation can be considered a mindful response to change.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Responsibility and accountability create self-organizing teams that work. The Declaration of Interdependence contains the principle, "We boost performance through group accountability for results and shared responsibility for team effectiveness." When an individual commits to delivering a particular feature during an iteration he accepts accountability for that delivery. When the team commits to a set of features by the end of the milestone, all members of the team accept that accountability. The product manager agrees to be accountable for providing requirements information to the team. The project leader agrees to be accountable for resolving impediments to team progress. When a team member commits to provide some information to another the next day, he has agreed to be accountable for that action. When team members commit to each other, when the team commits to the customer, when the project leader commits to provide the team with a particular resource, they are all agreeing to be held accountable.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“APM is about people, their interactions, and creating an environment in which individual creativity and capability erupts to create great products. It's people, not processes, that build great products.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“The agile movement supports individuals and teams through dedication to the concepts of self-organization, self-discipline, egalitarianism, respect for individuals, and competency. "Agile" is a socio-technical movement driven by both the desire to create a particular work environment and the belief that an adaptive environment is critical to the goal of delivering innovative products to customers.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Self-organizing teams form the core of APM. They blend freedom and responsibility, flexibility and structure. In the face of inconsistency and ambiguity, the teams strive to consistently deliver on the product vision within the project constraints. Accomplishing this requires teams with a self-organizing structure and self-disciplined individual team members. Building this kind of team is the core of an agile project leader's job.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Be quick, but don't hurry.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Agile methods don't attempt to describe everything that any development effort might need in thousands of pages of documentation. Instead they describe a minimal set of activities that are needed to create swarm intelligence.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Optimization implies that we already know how to do something but that we now need to improve it. Innovation implies that we don't know how to do something, and searching for that knowledge is paramount.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“rinciples, or "rules" in complexity theory terminology, affect how tools and practices are implemented. Practices are how principles are acted out. Grand principles that generate no action are mere vapor. Conversely, specific practices in the absence of guiding principles are often inappropriately used. Although the use of agile practices may vary from team to team, the principles are constant. Principles are the simple rules of complex human adaptive systems.”
― 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

“Creating change requires innovation: developing new products, creating new sales channels, reducing product development time, customizing products for increasingly smaller market segments. In addition, your company must be able to respond quickly to both anticipated and unanticipated changes created by your competitors and customers.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Agile Project Management focuses on selecting the right skills for project team members and molding them into productive teams.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Innovative ideas aren't generated in structured, authoritarian environments but in an adaptive culture based on the principles of self-organization and self-discipline.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“The essence of Agile movement, whether in new product development, new service offerings, software applications, or project management, rests on two foundational goals: delivering valuable products to customers and creating working environments in which people look forward to coming to work each day.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Anyone who practices ad hoc development under the guise of agile methods is an imposter.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“People don’t change that much. Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That is hard enough (Buckingham and Coffman 1999).”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products