Agile Portfolio and Project Management

“In NASA, we never punish error. We only punish the concealment of error.” - Al Siepert

“You can only elevate individual performance by elevating that of the entire system.” - W. Edwards Deming

“Project management is like juggling three balls - time, cost and quality. Program management is like a troupe of circus performers standing in a circle, each juggling-three balls and swapping balls from time to time.” - G. Reiss

This month’s edition is devoted to Agile Portfolio and Project Management.

In the article, Insights From 2 Agile/Lean Product Development Industry Thought Leaders, Tom Mellor, Chairman of the Scrum Alliance Board of Directors and Ken Pugh, Fellow Consultant, Net Objectives, industry thought leaders and agile/lean product development experts, briefly share insights on their perspective with respect to agile portfolio and project management.

Johanna Rothman in her article Project Portfolio Decisions—Decisions For Now, shares with us in a masterful way, that one of the advantages of agile and lean approaches is that they make managing the project portfolio easy.

Alan Shalloway in his article Using Product Portfolio Management to Improve the Efficiency of Teams, offers us great insights about how overloading teams, regardless of how critical the features being developed are, greatly slows down the delivery of even well-selected enhancements and what we can do about it; to ensure we are iteratively and incrementally adding either commercial or operational value; frequently and without waste.

Masa Maeda in his article The Lean-Agile Prism: Going Beyond the Agile Triangle, shares with us his insights by discussing the traditional triple constraint triangle, the agile inverted triangle and the new agile triangle. He proposes going one step beyond the agile triangle by taking into consideration lean thinking and adding a fourth element to the agile triangle, specifically that of design, to form the lean-agile prism.

Joe Krebs in his article Honestly Agile, discusses in this article why soft skills factors, honesty and integrity are not only essential among team members, but also for entire enterprises including their portfolios.

Daniel Markham in his article Agile Project Management offers us some tips and tricks of estimating with an eye on why estimating projects sometimes gives people the fits.

Finally, Roman Pichler, in his article “Timebox your Project”, shares how fixing time and flexing functionality facilitates the emergence of requirements and helps create a steady innovation cadence.

Check out the future editions of the Agile Journal, as Mr. Pichler will share additional articles based on his book, Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love.

Have a great reading experience!

Your agile buddy and editor,
Russell Pannone
Editor
Agile Journal