The Agile Project Manager

Explore, foster and apply agile principles in the context of the project team and organization.

Deliver value outcomes by producing reviewable, high-value incremental deliverables early and often based on stakeholder priorities. Engage stakeholders in providing feedback on these deliverables to prioritize and improve future incremental deliveries.

Manage the involvement of current and future stakeholders by creating an environment of trust that allows their needs and expectations to be aligned and their requests to be balanced by their understanding of the cost/effort involved. Promote participation and collaboration throughout the project lifecycle and provide the tools for effective and informed decision-making.

Create an environment of trust, learning, collaboration and conflict resolution that fosters team self-organization, improves relationships between team members and cultivates a high-performance culture.

Produce and maintain a plan that evolves from inception to closure, based on objectives, value, risks, constraints, stakeholder feedback, and review of findings.

Continually identify problems, impediments, and risks. Prioritize and resolve them in a timely manner. Monitor and communicate the status of problem resolution and implement process improvements to prevent reoccurrence.

Domain 1. Agile Principles

1. Promote agile principles by modeling and discussing agile values ​​to develop a common understanding within the team and between the team and stakeholders.
2. Help ensure that everyone has a common understanding of Agile values ​​and principles, Agile practices, and the terminology used to work effectively.
3. Support organizational change by educating and influencing processes, behaviors and people to make the organization more effective and efficient.
4. Practice visualization through highly visible information radiators that show the team’s actual progress and performance to foster transparency and trust.
5. Foster an environment of safety and trust, allowing everyone to experiment and make mistakes so they can continually learn and improve the way they work.
6. Enhance creativity by experimenting with new techniques and ideas about processes to discover more efficient and effective ways of working.
7. Encourage team members to share knowledge by collaborating and working together to reduce the risks of knowledge islands and bottlenecks.
8. Encourage emerging leadership within the team by establishing a respectful and safe environment in which new approaches can be tested to produce improvements and foster self-organization and empowerment.
9. Practice servant leadership by helping and encouraging others in their efforts so that they can perform at their highest level and continue to improve.

Domain 2. Delivering as per Value

1. Define deliverables by identifying units that can be produced incrementally to maximize their value to stakeholders while minimizing non-value-added activities.
2. Refine requirements as late as possible by agreeing on functionality acceptance criteria to deliver value.
3. Select and adapt team processes based on project and organizational characteristics and team experience to optimize value delivery.

1. Plan small incremental deliveries by organizing requirements into minimum saleable functionalities or minimum viable products, to facilitate early recognition and delivery of value.
2. Limit the size of increments and improve the frequency of reviews with appropriate stakeholders to identify and respond to risks early and at minimum cost.
3. Solicit feedback from customers and users by frequently demonstrating increments to confirm and improve business value.

1. Prioritize work units through collaboration with stakeholders to optimize the value of deliverables.
2. Perform frequent reviews and maintenance of work results, prioritizing and maintaining quality internally to reduce the total cost of incremental development.
3. Continually identify and prioritize environmental, operational and infrastructure factors to improve the quality and value of deliverables.

1. Conduct periodic operational reviews and/or checkpoints with stakeholders to obtain feedback and corrections to ongoing and planned work.
2. Balance the development of deliverables and risk reduction efforts by incorporating both value-producing and risk-reducing work into the stack to maximize the total value proposition over time.
3. Periodically re-prioritize requirements to reflect changes in the environment and stakeholder needs or preferences to maximize value.
4. Collect and prioritize relevant non-functional requirements (such as operational and safety) considering the environment in which the solution will be used to minimize the probability of failure.
5. Conduct frequent reviews of work products with inspections, reviews, and/or tests to identify and incorporate improvements in the entire process and the product/service.

Domain 3. Engaging Stakeholders

1. Identify and engage effective and empowered stakeholders through periodic reviews to ensure the team is aware of stakeholder interests, needs and expectations.
2. Identify and engage stakeholders (current and future) by promoting knowledge sharing from the beginning and throughout the project to ensure a seamless flow of information and value throughout the life of the project.

1. Build relationships with stakeholders by building working agreements among key stakeholders to promote effective engagement and collaboration.
2. Maintain appropriate stakeholder engagement by continually evaluating changes to the project and organization to ensure stakeholders are appropriately engaged.
3. Establish collaborative behaviors among members of the organization, encouraging group decision-making and conflict resolution to improve the quality of decisions and reduce the time required to decide.

1. Establish a common vision of the various project increments (products, deliverables, releases, iterations) by developing a high-level vision and supporting objectives to align stakeholder expectations and build trust.
2. Establish and maintain a shared understanding of success criteria, deliverables and acceptable agreements by facilitating awareness among stakeholders to align expectations and build trust.
3. Provide transparency into the status of work by communicating team progress, quality of work, impediments, and risks to help key stakeholders make informed decisions.
4. Provide detailed forecasts by balancing the need for certainty and the benefits of adaptability, so that stakeholders can plan effectively.

Domain 4. Team Performance

1. Cooperate with other team members to devise ground rules and internal processes to foster team coherence and strengthen team members’ commitment to shared outcomes.
2. Help build a team that has the interpersonal and technical skills necessary to achieve all known project objectives to create business value with minimal delay.

1. Encourage team members to become generalist specialists to reduce team size and bottlenecks,
2. Contribute to self-organization of work by empowering others and fostering emergent leadership to generate effective solutions and manage complexity.
3. Continually uncover team and personal motivators and demotivators and ensure team morale is high and team members remain motivated and productive throughout the project.

1. Facilitate close communication within the team and with appropriate external stakeholders through co-location or use of collaboration tools to reduce miscommunication and rework.
2. Reduce distractions to establish predictable results and optimize the value delivered.
3. Participate in aligning project and team goals by sharing a project vision to ensure the team understands how their goals fit into the project objectives.
4. Encourage the team to measure their velocity by monitoring and measuring actual performance in previous iterations or releases so that members gain a better understanding of their capacity and create more accurate forecasts.

Domain 5. Adaptive Planning

1. Plan at multiple levels (strategic, release, iteration, day) creating appropriate detail using incremental planning and progressive elaboration to balance predictability of outcomes with the ability to exploit opportunities.
2. Make planning activities visible and transparent by encouraging key stakeholder participation and publishing results to improve engagement and reduce uncertainty.
3. As the project progresses, set and manage stakeholder expectations by progressively establishing specific levels of engagement to ensure a common understanding of expected deliverables.

1. Adapt the planning cadence and process based on the results of periodic retrospectives on the characteristics and/or size/complexity/criticality of project deliverables to maximize value.
2. Inspect and adapt the project plan to reflect changes in requirements, schedule, budget, and shift priorities taking into account team learning, delivery experience, stakeholder feedback, and defects to maximize the business value delivered.

1. Size items using progressive elaboration techniques to determine the likely size of the project independent of velocity and external variables.
2. Adjust capacity by incorporating operation and maintenance demands and other factors to create an updated estimate range.
3. Create an estimate range for initial scope, schedule, and cost that reflects the current level of high-level understanding of the effort required to deliver the project, to develop a starting point for managing the project.
4. Refine scope, schedule, and cost estimate ranges to reflect the latest understanding of the effort required to deliver and manage the project.
5. Continually use data on changes in resource capacity, project size, and velocity metrics to evaluate the estimate to completion.

Domain 6. Detect and Solve Problems

1. Create an open and safe environment by encouraging conversation and experimentation to surface issues and impediments that are holding back the team or impeding its ability to deliver value.
2. Identify threats and problems by educating and involving the team at various points in the project so that they resolve them in a timely manner and improve the processes that cause the problems.
3. Ensure that issues are resolved by the appropriate team members and/or reposition expectations in light of issues that cannot be resolved to maximize value delivered.
4. Maintain a visible, monitored and prioritized list of threats and issues to increase accountability, promote action and monitor ownership and resolution status.
5. Communicate the status of threats and issues by maintaining a threat list and incorporating activities into the work backlog to provide transparency.

Domain 7. Continuously Improve (Product, Process, People)

1. Adapt the process by periodically reviewing and integrating team practices, organizational culture, and delivery objectives to ensure team effectiveness within established organizational guidelines and standards.
2. Improve team processes by conducting frequent retrospectives and improvement experiments to continually improve team, project, and organizational effectiveness.
3. Seek product feedback from incremental deliveries and frequent demonstrations to improve product value.
4. Create a continuous learning environment by providing opportunities for people to develop their skills to build a more productive team of generalist specialists.
5. Challenge existing process elements by performing value stream analysis and eliminating waste to improve individual efficiency and team effectiveness.
6. Create system improvements by spreading knowledge and practices across projects and organizational boundaries to prevent recurrence of identified problems and improve the effectiveness of the organization as a whole.