An Overview of Agile Project Management

What is agile project management?

- [Educator] Agile projects are great when business needs change frequently or the business wants to
receive value sooner. Agile does this by frequently delivering small chunks of a product known as
features. This steady release of deliverables requires a different approach to managing and implementing
work. You guessed it. Agile Project Management. With Agile, work is performed in time periods called
iterations or sprints. They typically last two to 12 weeks. The goal of each iteration is to deliver a
complete, ready-to-use feature. That's how value is delivered sooner. And if business needs change, you
can address that in a later iteration. Agile places more importance on people and interaction than
processes and tools. For example, people communicate when there's a reason to, not because the weekly
team meeting is scheduled. To facilitate interaction, business and technical team members work in the
same location or use collaboration tools to achieve the same effect. With Agile, your goal is to produce a
product, not reams of documentation. That doesn't mean no documentation. While the team is building
features, documentation is limited to what they need to do their work. Documentation like user guides are
added to the features list. The customer is much more engaged in an Agile project. In the waterfall
approach, the customer negotiates requirements upfront and then waits for the end deliverables. In Agile,
the customer collaborates throughout the development process, which means it's easier to meet their
needs. Changes are not only expected, but welcomed. The Agile philosophy views change as a way to
provide more value. With Agile, you can shift priorities quickly by adding new features in a later
iteration. Agile performs many of the same activities in waterfall project management in a slightly
different order. One way to think about it, the waterfall approach defines the scope of the project and then
estimates the time, cost, and quality to deliver that scope. Agile looks at time, cost, and quality as fixed
elements. Then you figure out which features you can produce given those constraints. The Agile
methodology described in this chapter starts with the envision stage where you define the goal and the
boundaries of the project. You then repeat the speculate, explore, and adapt stages to develop and test
features. At the end of the project, you perform a closing stage once to wrap things up. Change control is
done by prioritizing the backlog of features and risk is managed with frequent releases. If you're familiar
with Agile, you might think Agile means IT projects. It turns out, Agile works with non-IT projects too, as
long as deliverables can be produced and implemented in short periods and can be added to in the
future. Agile works well for projects with changing business needs or a desire to produce value quickly. If
you want to practice, identify portions of the hospital scheduling project that could benefit from an Agile
approach.
The agile project management lifecycle
- [Instructor] Agile development uses activities often referred to as sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint
review and sprint retrospective. Other courses in the LinkedIn library look at Agile development in
depth. However, if you want to manage Agile work within a larger hybrid project, you might apply Agile
project management as defined by Jim Highsmith. Jim Highsmith's Agile project management life cycle is
made up of five stages: envision, speculate, explore, adapt, and close. Let's look at how these stages
fit into both the project management picture and Agile development approach. The envision stage is the
start of your project when you and the customer, well, envision what you're going to deliver. You define
the project goal and objectives and figure out who you need on your team. You also set up the
guidelines for how you'll run the project. Things like how the team works to solve problems, how you'll
collaborate and communicate, what hours the team works. When envisioning is done, you'll have a
project definition that spells out the project customer goal, objectives, scope and stakeholders. At this
point in the life cycle an Agile project diverges from the waterfall approach. For each iteration you cycle
through the speculate, explore, and adapt stages. The speculate stage is about planning, except that you
plan an iteration, not the entire project. Part of the plan is identifying the business functions you'll address
in the iteration and the features you'll develop to satisfy those requirements. You estimate the effort for
each feature and you identify or update risks related to those features. Just like that, you're at the explore
stage. This is where the team builds the iteration's features. Remember how Agile uses interaction when
it's needed? The business and technical folks also hold frequent peer reviews of features in
development to provide feedback on what's been done. The team also tests what they're building so it's
production-ready at the end of the iteration. The adapt stage gives you a chance to act on the feedback you
get and fix things that aren't quite right. The product owner or customer conducts a final review of the
iteration's features. You hold a team meeting to evaluate what happened during the iteration. That way
you can capture lessons learned and adjust the plans for future iterations. Once you complete the adapt
stage, you repeat the speculate, explore and adapt stages until all the features are complete or you've used
up the time and budget allocated to the project. When the features are done, you're ready for the close
stage. It's time to make sure everything is done. You also produce a final set of lessons learned to use in
future projects. The Agile life cycle steps through stages for each iteration so you can start building
features more quickly. Try building a schedule that shows the Agile life cycle with four iterations for the
hospital scheduling system.
Plan an iteration
- [Instructor] With an Agile project, you still plan things before you dive into the work. The speculate
stage is when the business and technical teams identify the features to include in the current iteration. A
feature is a small function or deliverable that addresses a business need. In the hospital project,
scheduling functions, user documentation, and training could be features. The typical naming convention
is action followed by result. For example, find next available appointment time, or change procedure
room. The first iteration speculate stage takes a little longer than the following ones. That's because you
have to identify and estimate all the features for the project, which is called the backlog. One way to build
the backlog is to write each feature on a sticky note or index card. If your organization uses an agile
collaboration tool, you can add features there. When the feature list is complete, the business and
technical teams review the features and prioritize them. The business team prioritizes from a functionality
perspective. The technical team considers whether it makes more sense to build features in a specific
order. Don't worry if the business folks identify new features or ask questions about existing ones. The
agile approach can take that in stride. Worst case, if the list gets really long, you can talk about features to
push to a future project. The business and technical team members also work together to develop
estimates for all features in the project. Once the prioritized feature list is approved by the customer or
sponsor, you can create the iteration, milestone and release plan. This plan outlines all the features, when
they're scheduled in the iterations, and when they'll be implemented in the organization. And you're ready
to start the explore stage of the first iteration. Time passes and like any project, an Agile project doesn't
necessarily follow your plan. Each time you start another speculate stage, you have to re-estimate,
reevaluate, and reprioritize the features to decide which ones to include in the iteration. Like features that
weren't completed and are now back in the backlog, or new features that were identified since the original
backlog was built. And the next features in the backlog that you want to include. The speculate stage
doesn't take long. If your iterations are three weeks long, you might spend a couple of days in the
speculate stage. You start each iteration by planning what will be done. For practice, use the backlog in
the exercise files to build a plan for the next iteration.
Manage the explore stage
- [Instructor] Agile projects get you to the explore stage quickly. This is where the team starts
building and implementing features. At this stage, a lot of collaboration occurs between the business and
technical folks. The bulk of the effort and the explore stage is working on the features assigned to the
current iteration. The business and technical team members start each day with a short standup
meeting, usually 15 minutes. While these meetings occur during all agile stages, they're key during the
explore stage. Each person briefs the team on what they completed the day before, what they plan to
finish today, and any help they need. If issues come up, you don't resolve them in the daily
meeting. Instead, make a note of them, but work on resolving them after the meeting. The people who
tackle the issue report on it to the group in the next day's meeting. The only documentation that comes out
of the meeting is adding issues to a register to track lessons learned. The team runs these meetings. That
doesn't mean you as the project manager have nothing to do. Your main job is to remove obstacles so
team members can focus on their work. During the meeting, you track progress on the features planned
for this iteration. If features are behind schedule, you need to find out why and help get things back on
track. If issues are to blame, add them and their solutions to the issue log. Speaking of issues, keep an eye
on any that aren't getting resolved and offer to help. As with any meeting, if it starts to go off track, you
can jump in to help refocus the team's attention. After the meetings, notify stakeholders of
progress. Here's a key concept With the agile approach. You stop working on features when the iteration
is scheduled to end, even if the features aren't done. For example, if your explore stage is four weeks, you
stop at four weeks. If features are incomplete, you put the incomplete work into the backlog to address in
a future iteration. On the other hand, if the team cranks out the iteration features faster than they
estimated, you can start working on another feature from the backlog to fill in the rest of the time. The
explore stage is mostly about building and implementing features, with short daily meetings to help keep
things on track. For practice, create a checklist for things you as project manager should watch for during
the daily standup meetings.
Handle the adapt and close stages
- [Instructor] You've made it to the last stage of an iteration, the adapt stage. It's a time for review and
reflection, like spending New Year's Day evaluating your previous year and resolving to do even better in
the next. As you might expect, you and the team compare what was delivered to what was planned. You
talk about what did and didn't work. The team might identify changes to make future iterations run
better. Take time to review with the customer what's been done and make sure that the features are
working the way they should. At the same time, check that the features produce the business benefits
they're supposed to. Don't forget to hold a lessons learned session to share feedback. That way everyone
can brainstorm ways to resolve issues and eliminate obstacles. Plus, everyone can improve by taking
advantage of the things that went well. Feedback can lead to changes in the next iteration speculate
stage. You might add or remove features from the backlog. The team could modify their estimates for
features or update the risk register. The customer might reprioritize the features in the backlog. Maybe the
team composition needs tweaking based on people's availability, or the skills needed. Finally, you might
modify processes that aren't working well. The end of an iteration is a great time to celebrate success. In
addition, the adapt stage is a chance for team members to take a quick break so they're fresh and
enthusiastic about starting the next iteration. If there are more iterations in the project, the end of the
adapt stage triggers the speculate stage for the next iteration. On the other hand, if the project schedule or
budget has been used up, it's time for the close phase and tying up loose ends. You reconcile the project
financials. Have all the invoices been paid? Have you closed the project account so people don't charge to
them by mistake? You also need to work with resource managers to reassign team members. As in any
project, you communicate the project results to the customer and stakeholders. It's important to get
closure at the end of each iteration and the end of the project. That way you confirm the success of this
and future projects. For practice build agendas for the review meetings you plan to hold during an
iterations adapt stage.

Challenge: Agile
(robotic music) - In this challenge, you want to leverage Agile approaches for the hospital scheduling
project, wherever possible. To help identify project areas that might work for Agile. You and your team
have done some research, use the research results in the exercise files to determine how well Agile
methods would work on the scheduling system for each area of the hospital. Take about 10 minutes to
identify your Agile candidates. After you identify the sections you would select for Agile, you can
compare your list to the one I created.