Quotes from Jim Highsmith

The greatest risk we face in software development is that of overestimating our own knowledge.

The tail is the time period from "code slush" (true code freezes are rare) or "feature freeze" to actual deployment. This is the time period when companies do some or all of the following: beta testing, regression testing, product integration, integration testing, documentation, defect fixing. The worst "tail" I've encountered was 18 months—18 months from feature freeze to product release, and most of that time was spent in QA. I've

A traditional project manager focuses on following the plan with minimal changes, whereas an agile leader focuses on adapting successfully to inevitable changes.

agile development reflects a product lifecycle approach (continuous delivery of value), rather than a project approach (begin-end). While an individual release of a product can be managed as a project, an agile approach views a release as a single stage in a product's ongoing evolution.

In high-performance teams, "the leaders managed the principles, and the principles managed the team.

APM focuses on team management, from building self-organizing teams to developing a servant leadership style. It is both more difficult, and ultimately more rewarding than managing tasks.

In an agile project the team takes care of the tasks and the project leader takes care of the team.

At the core of healthy team relationships is trust and respect.

In fact, in an agile project, technical excellence is measured by both capacity to deliver customer value today and create an adaptable product for tomorrow.

The capability of self-organizing teams lies in collaboration. When two engineers scratch out a design on a whiteboard, they are collaborating. When team members meet to brainstorm a design, they are collaborating. When team leaders meet to decide whether a product is ready to ship, they are collaborating. The result of any collaboration can be categorized as a tangible deliverable, a decision, or shared knowledge.

What is the difference between project management and project leadership? Although there is an elusive line between them, the core difference is that management deals with complexity, whereas leadership deals with change.

Agile Project Management -like its lean development counterparts- streamlines the development process, concentrating on value-adding activities and eliminating overhead and compliance activities.

Agile project leaders help their team balance at the edge of chaos—some structure, but not too much; adequate documentation, but not too much; some up-front architecture work, but not too much. Finding these balance points is the "art" of agile leadership.

In a self-organized team, individuals take accountability for managing their own workload, shift work among themselves based on need and best fit, and take responsibility for team effectiveness. Team members have considerable leeway in how they deliver results, they are self-disciplined in their accountability for those results, and they work within a flexible framework.

There are three particularly important issues involved in delivering customer value: focusing on innovation rather than efficiency and optimization, concentrating on execution, and lean thinking.

The iterative piece of agile can be defined by four key terms: iterative, feature-based, timeboxed, and incremental.

Innovation delivers products that we can barely imagine. Efficiency and optimization are appropriate drivers for a production project, whereas innovation and creativity should drive an exploration-type project. A production mindset can restrict our vision to what appears doable. An exploration mindset helps us explore what seems impossible.

Leaders who want to create adaptive, self-organizing teams steer rather than control—they influence, nudge, facilitate, teach, recommend, assist, urge, counsel, and, yes, direct in some instances.

APM's core purpose of creating innovative new products and services means dealing with constant technological and competitive change, generating novel ideas, and continually reducing product development schedules.

The quality of results from any collaboration effort are driven by trust and respect

When project leaders focus on delivery, they add value to projects. When they focus on planning and control, they tend to add overhead.

Agile Project Management is an execution-biased model, not a planning-and-control-biased model.

The Agile Project Management principles and framework encourage learning and adapting as an integral part of delivering value to customers.

If you want to innovate, you have to iterate!