Agile Project Management For Dummies

Chapter 5

Putting Agile into Action: The Environment

In This Chapter

Creating your agile workspace

Rediscovering low-tech communication and using the right high-tech communication

Finding and using the tools you need

Conjure up a mental picture of your current working environment. Perhaps it looks like the following setup. The IT team sits in cube city in one departmental area with the project manager somewhere within walking distance. You work with an offshore development team eight time zones away. The business customer is on the other side of the building. Your manager has a small office tucked away somewhere. Conference rooms are usually fully booked, and even if you were to get into one, someone would chase you out within the hour.

Your project documents are stored in folders on a shared drive. The development team gets at least 100 e-mails a day. The project manager holds a team meeting every week and, referring to the project plan, tells the developers what to work on. The project manager also creates a weekly status report and posts it on the shared drive. The product manager is usually too busy to talk to the project manager to review progress, but periodically sends e-mails ...