Jim Highsmith Quotes

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.

Documentation is not understanding, process is not discipline, formality is not skill.

Agility is principally about mindset, not practices.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Leaders who want to create adaptive, self-organizing teams steer rather than control - they influence, nudge, facilitate, teach, recommend, assist, urge, counsel, and, yes, direct in some instances.

The quality of results from any collaboration effort are driven by trust and respect

The best way to get a project done faster is to start sooner

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.

If you have unskilled people who work poorly together, no amount of process will save your projects.

Dialogue, discussion, and participatory decision making are all part of building self-discipline.

A team can employ agile practices, but it won't achieve the potential benefit of agile development without embracing agile values and principles.

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.

Agility is the ability to adapt and respond to change ... agile organizations view change as an opportunity, not a threat.

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.

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.

The feature delivery approach helps define a workable interface between customers and product developers.

Iterative development, when accompanied with reasonable end-of-iteration reviews - product, technical, process, team - is also self-correcting.

The formula for success is simple: deliver today, adapt tomorrow.

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.

Peel back the facade of rigorous methodology projects and ask why the project was successful, and the answer is people.

If you find that your organization can't make the hard decisions that Scrum demands, then high-risk, uncertain projects have very little probability of success in your organization.

Large portions of the productivity gains from agile methods come not from doing things better, but from not doing them at all.

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.

Project leaders need to focus on value in several ways: value determination (with product owners), value prioritization (backlog management), and value creation (iterative development).

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.

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.

The agile value "Delivering Value over Meeting Constraints" provides a focus for rethinking how we measure performance on projects.

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.

The Agile Project Management principles and framework encourage learning and adapting as an integral part of delivering value to customers.

If we want to build great products, we need great people. If we want to attract and keep great people, we need great principles

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.

At the core of healthy team relationships is trust and respect.

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.

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.

A methodology's weight is a product of its size and ceremony.

Innovative ideas aren't generated in structured, authoritarian environments but in an adaptive culture based on the principles of self-organization and self-discipline.

When project leaders focus on delivery, they add value to projects. When they focus on planning and control, they tend to add overhead.

Agility is more attitude than process, more environment than methodology.

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.

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).

Agile Project Management -like its lean development counterparts- streamlines the development process, concentrating on value-adding activities and eliminating overhead and compliance activities.

Agility is the ability to balance flexibility and stability

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.

The greatest risk we face in software development is that of overestimating our own knowledge.

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.

Process is not a substitute for skill.

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.

The iterative piece of agile can be defined by four key terms: iterative, feature-based, timeboxed, and incremental.

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.

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.