Latest Agile project management ideas

Updating my Agile Project Management course today before my course starting 30th July, gives me time to reflect on what you really need to get out of this course.

Understand Agile Project Management

Agile approaches are becoming the norm but in a recent Agile survey, only 12% believe there is a high level of Agile competence within their organisation.

My first responsibility is to ensure that you really understand what Agile is and what it takes to achieve it. We need to look at the roles and responsibilities and the principles of how people collaborate in Agile to understand the impact on how teams and projects are currently organised.

This includes providing you with guidance on how to brief senior managers on their role in an Agile environment, which is more than checking up on progress against the project plan. We need them to accept the iterative nature of the work, which means they need to be active decision makers on prioritising requirements throughout the project lifecycle.

Recognise Agile Project Management is a blend of project management and change management

A common problem in project management today is that Agile approaches, which are designed to deliver value to the customers early and frequently throughout the project lifecycle are creating a backlog of business change that needs to be implemented. It is one of the most common complaints from those who must work differently as a result of projects, they just cannot keep pace with all of the changes. So in my course we are going to look at how we include implementation activities into each of the Sprints, so that the project team and the business they serve can share this work.

Keep you update with the latest thinking

We use the AgilePM handbook on the course, but as soon as a book is published, its content is fixed. I update the course to bring in latest thinking, including:

User research, user experience and design thinking concepts – the principles of ‘focus on the business need’ and ‘build incrementally from firm foundations’ mean we need a good understanding of business priorities. We need stakeholder analysis to understand who our users are, and we need techniques that help us map their journey of what we are creating so we can understand their priorities. This might not be in the handbook, but it is in my training!

Deployment activities – deployment is the word used in Agile Project Management to cover all the change management activities that we need to include in our plans, ensuring that what is created is being used. To do this, you need an understanding of behavioural change and how we learn new ways of working so I include a section on this.

Appreciate that no adoption of Agile is the same

Agile Project Management should be tailored to meet your circumstances, so don’t get fixated on the suggested documents, names of the roles rules for planning and estimating. It is my job to show you how these work in enough depth that you can work out how they can be used in your organisation.

I am always interested in your opinions, so what else do you think needs to be included to reflect how we are all using Agile approaches?