The Project Manager's Guide to Mastering Agile: Principles and Practices for an Adaptive Approach

PREFACE

THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT PROFESSION is beginning to go through rapid and profound changes due to the widespread adoption of agile methodologies. Those changes are likely to dramatically change the role of project managers in many environments as we have known them and raise the bar for the entire project management profession.

It is not a simple matter of making a binary choice between a totally plan-driven approach and totally adaptive or agile approach. There are many alternatives between those extremes, and it takes a lot of skill to adapt an approach to fit the situation. This book is designed to help project managers with a traditional, plan-driven project management background understand these challenges and to develop a more adaptive project management approach for blending traditional project management with agile principles and practices in the right proportions to fit a given project and business environment.

Agile is changing the way we think and work in many industries and application areas. The impact today is most obvious in the area of software and information technology, where an agile approach is essential to deal with the level of uncertainty in a typical software development project; however, the rapidly changing and competitive business world we live in today is already beginning to rapidly expand the influence of agile to many other areas.

This is the third book I've written on the subject of agile project management. My primary motivation in all of the ...