The Project Manager's Guide to Mastering Agile, 2nd Edition

PREFACE

BACKGROUND

THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT PROFESSION is going through rapid and profound changes due to the widespread influence of Agile:

It is becoming very apparent that the classical plan‐driven approach to project management that has been the predominantly accepted way of doing project management for a long time is no longer the only way to do project management:

• Rather than force‐fitting all projects to a classical plan‐driven project management approach, it is much better to fit the approach to the nature of the project.
• It’s particularly important to develop an adaptive approach for projects that have a high level of uncertainty and/or where creativity and innovation are more important than planning and control to achieve predictability.

Those changes are likely to dramatically change the role of project managers in many environments as we have known them, raise the bar for the entire project management profession, and perhaps even eliminate the role of some Project Managers as we have known them.

From an Agile perspective, there have also been some equally significant changes:

• Agile and Scrum have grown over the years from a focus on small, single‐team projects to much larger and more complex enterprise‐level projects requiring multiple teams.
• That has made it evident that scaling Agile for that kind of project requires some kind of overall management framework which might include some kind of project/program management.

In both of these environments, there is ...