The Role of the Agile Project Manager

Thank you for attending our session at ProjectWorld 2012.

We recognize that this is a huge topic, and that in one hour we just scratched the surface, so we have collected some further information for you. If you have any questions or comments we would love to hear from you, so check out our contact page or just leave a comment on this page and we will respond.

Workshops

LeanIntuit is hosting a Management 3.0 course on May 28-29 in Kitchener. This course aims a is for project managers who want to become great team leaders or line managers.

References

During the presentation we referenced a study by QSMA that assessed the performance of 29 Agile development projects against a database of 8,000+ development projects in three key areas: productivity, time-to-market and quality. The study found that the Agile teams were:

  • 37 percent faster delivering their software to market
  • 16 percent more productive
  • Able to maintain normal defect counts despite significant schedule compression

To download the study: http://www.qsma.com/agile-impact-report.html

During Q&A we mentioned Dan Pink‘s TED talk on Drive: The Suprising Truth About What Motivates Us.  There is a great RSA Animates version of this talk as well.

After the session an attendee asked about using Agile for product development, and we recommended The Principles of Product Development Flow by Donald G. Reinertsen

Further Information for the Agile PM

Books

There are quite a few great books on Agile project management, some of which we have collected on our reading page.

In particular we recommend:

Agile Project Management – Jim Highsmith

Management 3.0 – Jurgen Appelo

Manage It! – Johanna Rothman

The Software Project Manager’s Bridge to Agility – Michele Sliger

Blogs

There are a several people who write great blogs that often discuss Agile management and Agile project management.  Here are some of our favourites:

Jurgen Appelo

Esther Derby

Johanna Rothman

Mike Cottmeyer

The PMI And Agile

The PMI has introduced a new certification: the Agile Certified Practitioner. They have also collected some great information for the aspiring Agile PMP on their PMI-Agile-Toolbox page. They also have a Agile Community of Practice site, which has grown into a lively community.

Agile Learning

Reading

If you are interested in Agile learning in general, once again we have  collected some great books on our reading page.

The Agile Manifesto and Agile principles are great places to start, and always  places to come back to if you feel you are drifting in your Agile journey.

Events

A good way to learn more about Agile is to attend local conferences and peer-to-peer groups. It is a fantastic, low-cost way to learn some great stuff, and to also meet other local practitioners.

Waterloo AgileLean is the Kitchener-Waterloo peer-to-peer group (founded by Leanintuit principal Declan Whelan). It hosts sessions by local presenters on the last Tuesday of every month.

The Toronto Agile Community hosts a series of events in Toronto. Primary among them is the Agile Tour Toronto event, normally held in early November . The community hosts an OpenSpace conference in April, called Agile Open. It also holds monthly meetings, where local people present topics of interest to them.

You may want to consider attending Agile Coach Camp Canada in Ottawa from June 22-24.