InfoQ

News

Agile PMs Get it Right the Last Time

Posted by Deborah Hartmann on Oct 20, 2006 06:58 AM

Community
Agile
Topics
Leadership,
Agile Techniques
Tags
Planning,
Budgets
Doug DeCarlo challenges project managers to ditch the counter-productive "get-it-right-the-first-time" philosophy practiced for so long by so many, in his Gantthead article, "Get It Right the Last Time: Developing an Agile Attitude," (free Gannthead registration is required to view this article).

Instead, he proposes some Agile attitudes to help managers work differently.  His ideas fly in the face of what many traditional practitioners hold dear:
...spending six months or more doing exhaustive requirements analysis not only wastes time, the resultant output will be obsolete by the time you are finished, and that’s not even counting the further obsolesce that sets in during the time it takes to execute the already-obsolete requirements. This results in an oxymoronic deliverable: a new legacy system, one that’s outmoded as soon as it goes into production.
He says that the most difficult part of agile project management is not in applying a new set of tools, but in changing one’s mindset or attitude about what it takes to succeed.
Applying a new set of tools while using a traditional project management mindset gets you nowhere slowly.
Read the article to see how DeCarlo's 5 proposed Agile Attitudes will help managers deliver in an Agile enviromnent:
  1. Change is the norm, not the exception
  2. Reality rules, not the project plan
  3. The future drives the baseline, not the past
  4. The process serves the people -- it does not handcuff them
  5.  Leading takes precedence over managing
Decarlo is Principal of The Doug DeCarlo Group, co-founder of the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN), and author of eXtreme Project Management - Using Leadership, Principles and Tools to Deliver Value in the Face of Volatility.

Related Sponsor

VersionOne is recognized by Agile practitioners as the leader in Agile project management tools. Companies such as Adobe, BBC, CNN, Dow, HP, IBM, Sony and 3M have turned to VersionOne to help deliver greater value to their customers.

No comments

Reply

Exclusive Content

Typemock: Past, Present and Future

Eli Lopian of Typemock answers a few questions on Typemock origins and where Typemock is headed.

Agile in Practice: What Is Actually Going On Out There?

Scott Ambler talks about actual data resulting from surveys made during 2006-2008, showing how Agile is perceived and implemented within organizations.

Building Smart Windows Applications

From QCon 2008, Daniel Moth presents on using Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 to create compelling rich Windows applications.

Joshua Kerievsky about Industrial XP

Joshua Kerievsky, founder of Industrial Logic, talks about Industrial Extreme Programming which extends XP by including practices dealing with management, customers and developers.

Jeff Barr Discusses Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Evangelist Jeff Barr discusses SimpleDB, S3, EC2, SQS, cloud computing, how different Amazon services interact, origins of AWS, AWS globalization and the March AWS outage.

More Than Just Spin (Up) : Virtualization for the Enterprise and SaaS

Cloud services have helped bring virtualization to the forefront. Its full power however, also includes other benefits such as high availability, disaster recovery, and rapid provisioning.

Ruby Beyond Rails

John Lam talks about his path to dynamic languages, some of the problems of making IronRuby run fast, and how the DLR helps with implementing languages.

VMware Infrastructure 3 Book Excerpt and Author Interview

VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide provides a wealth of practical insights into setting up virtualization in todays corporate environments.