FEATURED BOOK: The Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility
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Written by Brad Appleton
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Sunday, 10 August 2008 |
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 by Michelle Sliger and Stacia Broderick
For all you PMPs, PMOs, PMI
members and PMBoK
people out there ... This is it! This book is "the one" for you. Look no further than Michelle Sliger's and Stacia
Broderick's The
Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility to take all the standard
project management concepts and terms you've been entrenched in for the past
decade or three and to explain the crux of Agility to you from within that
domain. The book's title has it exactly
right: It is nothing less than a "bridge to agility" for long-time project
management professionals who suddenly find themselves needing to understand and
manage agile projects in short-order time.
The book is divided into three parts:
- an
Agile Overview
- The
Bridge: Relating PMBOK Guide Practices to Agile Practices
- Crossing
the Bridge to Agile
Both Michelle Sliger and Stacia Broderick are Project
Management Professionals (PMPs) with many years of experience practicing and
applying PMBoK before "bridging the gap" to Agile Project Management:
"As PMPs who are now agile enthusiasts, we feel it is important to ...
dispel the mistaken notion in the agile community that PMPs cannot be good
agile project managers. We would like to build a bridge between the two." - Michelle Sliger and Stacia Broderick, from the Preface
of the book
The book's preface gives the motivation for the book and
clearly presents the overall structure and content. The introduction tells the
personal story of how one of the book's authors "crossed the bridge" from PMBoK
to Agile PM.
Part I comprises chapters 1-3: Chapter 1 dives right into
the foundations of software agility, giving a very high-level history and
description, and then presents the Agile
Manifesto and its Principles
of Agile Software; Chapter 2 looks at the history of the PMI and the PMBoK
Guide and then relates its project lifecycle phases and process groups to the
"Agile Fractal"; Chapter 3 then delves into more detail about the agile
development lifecycle, explaining the concepts of iteration plans & retrospectives
and the other various levels
of agile planning.
Part II consists of a chapter for each of the PMBoK's nine
knowledge areas. For each knowledge area, it describes what you have previously
done as a "traditional" project manager and what you would instead do to
address that knowledge area as an agile project manager. What I found
particularly useful in Part II were the tables in each section that clearly
identified each traditional project management activity and deliverable and how
it is handled in agile projects. Better still is the summary table at the end
of each chapter with the two columns: "I
used to do this" and "Now I do this".
Part III covers the "soft skills" of agile project &
change leadership. The various chapters discuss: how the PM's responsibilities
change from traditional to Agile projects, interactions with other teams
(especially ones that aren't Agile), Aligning with and gaining support from a
PMO, and "Selling the benefits of Agile" to other internal and external roles
and stakeholders throughout the enterprise. The last chapter in this section is
my favorite, addressing common mistakes, pitfalls myths and stereotypes about agile
development and agile projects.
Two appendices (one giving an overview of Agile methods,
the other of agile project management deliverables), plus a glossary of terms,
wrap-up the book very clearly and concisely.
I found the book to be a bit Scrum-centric in its terms
and approach, but that is perfectly reasonable given that Scrum is the most
heavily used Agile method (as of this writing) and the only one that that is
almost exclusively and comprehensively devoted to project management practices
and concerns.
For those who want to see more before running out and
buying this book, Michelle Sliger's
website has a nice collection
of her articles and presentations (including a 4-part series on Relating
PMBoK to Agile Practices that was a precursor of some of the material
in the book), and the introduction
along with chapter 5 are available online at the publisher's website.
It is so nice to have a book for traditional project
managers that I can simply say "Here - read this; it explains everything you need to know to understand
Agility and begin managing an agile project." Previously, my top recommendation
for an agile project management "How To" book was Mike Cohn's Agile
Estimating and Planning. And for those who are not already PMPs or
ingrained in the PMBoK, that is still probably the best and most practical book
available today. But for anyone coming from many years of being steeped in
PMBoK, PMI, PMP or PMOs, The
Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility is the quintessential
guide to get you started and on your way to understanding and applying Agile
Project Management.
About the Reviewer
Brad
Appleton is an enterprise SCM/ALM solution architect for a Fortune 100
technology company. Currently he helps projects and teams adopt and apply agile
development & SCM practices. Brad also author's the Agile CM Environments blog, and is
co-author of Software
Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration, the
"Agile SCM" column
in CMCrossroads.com's CM
Journal, and is a former section editor for The C++ Report. Since 1987,
Brad has extensive experience using, developing, and supporting SCM
environments for teams of all shapes and sizes. He holds an M.S. in Software
Engineering and a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics.
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