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Agile Management, Metrics, and Mentoring
Volume 3 Number 2 - February 2008
Agile teams typically do very well in
adopting new development processes. But the same isn't always true for the
management team: adopting Agile practices and retrofitting them to legacy
management organizations pose major hurdles. It's not surprising, therefore,
that the Agile Journal's focus on management and metrics always draws
tremendous interest.
For our February 2008 issue, Agile
Management, Metrics, and Mentoring, we had no shortage of contributions. The
challenges in transitioning to Agile practices and integrating the program
management office (PMO) with Agile development teams are many: Planning and
estimating approaches are deep-seated, PMOs are conditioned to receive project
status and reporting using traditional metrics, Agile metrics don't typically
align, and so on. Matt Gelbwaks stresses the role that the Agile PMO can play,
not only in providing checks and balances, but in changing the tone of the
project by focusing on its "holistic well-being." Within this context, Agile
metrics can help monitor projects' progress and also assist in organizational
transformation.
If metrics are not well-aligned with
execution, teams find themselves reacting to what is being measured (e.g.,
percent complete) rather than focusing on delivering business value. Ross
Pettit argues that Agile practices really lend themselves to management-driven
metrics, where the natural output of the team's progress (e.g., stories
completed) is what is tracked and managed rather than the classic style of
metrics-driven management. For developers, Kirk Knoernschild delves into design
and code quality metrics, stressing their critical role in an Agile project's
review process.
How Agile is your team? Is your Agile
adoption on the right track? Bill Krebs and Per Kroll propose that teams use an
Agile Evaluation Framework (Agile:EF) to monitor the state of a team's Agile
adoption and align with the appropriate metrics to track Agile teams' success. Jonathan
Poole shares some best practices in adopting Agile approaches, with particular
emphasis on training and motivation. And Guy Beaver challenges organizations to
use Agile methods to rid themselves of process-centric silos and use
cross-functional teams to align with business goals.
The flexibility that teams find in
using Agile approaches can be expanded beyond core development activities, and
provide a broader framework for greater leverage. Joshua Gross, John Daughtry,
and Jason Lee suggest that by combining heuristic approaches in Agile development with
those of usability engineering (e.g., scenario-based design), teams will
achieve a unified, improved, and pragmatic development process, centered on
people, their tasks, and their needs.
We certainly don't limit our focus on
Agile management and metrics to this one issue - the Agile Journal will be
addressing these topics as they relate to enterprise Agile initiatives
throughout the year. So please share your advice and experiences with the Agile
Journal community. We're especially interested in best (and even worst)
practices and the ways in which teams transition their organizations to Agile
practices. If you'd like to contribute an article on an upcoming topic, go to
the "Letters to the Editor" in the forum at agilejournal.com and send us your
ideas.
Liz Barnett
Editor in Chief
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Incremental Agile Adoption
Small steps can lead to big progress, particularly in the case of Agile adoption. Few organizations have the luxury of adopting a new development process in its entirety; legacy processes are too well-entrenched and the cost and risks of change frequently outweigh the short-term benefits. Instead, most organizations considering Agile practices adopt them incrementally, steadily building on their successes and ridding themselves of traditional approaches. Over the course of several projects (meas...
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The Agile PMO
Using Agile metrics to manage projects and
strengthen organizational transformation.
Traditional program management offices (PMOs) are responsible
for providing checks and balances to the development and IT organizations regarding
budget and schedule. Oversight and
management that comes from the PMO drives certain behaviors in the project
managers (PMs) and therefore in the project staff. Similarly, the Agile PMO provides certain
checks and balance, but principally focuses o...
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Making Agile Reviews Effective
Design and
code reviews promise to improve software quality, ensure compliance with
standards, and serve as a valuable teaching tool for developers. As with most
practices, there are subtle nuances surrounding how they're performed that can
dramatically affect their value. In some organizations, reviews are a valuable
aspect of the software lifecycle. In others, they are a necessary evil tainted
with political bureaucracy and big egos. Sub-optimal reviews conducted late in
the lifecyc...
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 | Management-Driven Metrics Versus Metric-Driven Management
Performance
and quality metrics are not indigenous to traditional IT practices. When metrics are brought to bear to achieve
greater transparency or compliance in an IT project, they are imposed on teams,
grafted on top of day-to-day execution.
The poor alignment of metric to execution means project managers must
constantly translate work effort into progress measures. Because these acts of translation take a lot
of time and are not natural fits with execution, project man...
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 | Using Evaluation Frameworks for Quick Reflections
Are we
Agile? If we ask a leader we'll get one
perspective, but if we ask each person on the team we may be surprised by the
variety of answers. Since 2002, IBM has used
agile evaluation frameworks with dozens of teams to help them learn, improve,
and share their experiences with agile practices. The metrics in the Extreme Programming
Evaluation Framework, or (XP:EF) originally focused on XP, and similar
instances covered other methods.[i] But because the frame...
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 | Adopting Agile
The term "Agile" in the
context of software development is no longer an alien word, with many companies
professing to do, think or indeed be
Agile. While on the surface this is great for the software industry, it can
bring problems as there is no single definition of Agile or definitive process
that everyone follows. Carrying out projects and transitioning to Agile can
therefore end in disaster if perceptions and expectations differ. This is where
training, communication and motivation ar...
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 | Knocking Down Silos: Transitioning the Enterprise to Agile
In a previous article addressing the challenges of Enterprise Requirements Management, it was suggested that the legacy enterprise organization requires restructuring so that productivity gains promised by Agile methods can take root and grow. At the same time, there is a growing chorus of IT skeptics who are singing about the ineffectiveness of the CIO.[1[2] Legacy enterprise organizations struggle to stay coupled with business drivers, with the most collaborative relation...
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| FEATURED BOOK |
 | FEATURED BOOK: Lean Project Management: Eight Principles for Success by Lawrence P. Leach
Lean
Project Management: Eight Principles for Success, is actually a second edition of
the eBook Eight Secrets to Supercharge
your Project with CCPM. It is available both in hardcopy and eBook formats.
Lawrence Leach (www.advanced-projects.com)
is perhaps best known as author of one of the most comprehensive texts on the
subject of Critical Chain
Project Management (CCPM). In this book, subtitled "Combining CCPM and Lean tools to accelerate project results," the
author essentially integr...
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