Agile Project Management: A One Step At A Time Entrepreneur's Leadership Guide To Scaling Up Your Software Development Business: Achieve Goals And Success Faster By Applying Scrum and Kanban Strategy

By Philip Small

Do you want to run your small business using the same strategies as the leaders in your field?

Do you want to have a clear advantage over your competitors?

Do you want your customers to be happy and eager to pay you even more?

It's time to learn Agile.

 

With agile project management, you can create high-quality products in less time. You can manage projects in a way that actually empowers and motivates your employees. Last but not least, your customers will LOVE working with you if your company uses lean and agile methods.

 

This book will show you how to implement agile methods in your startup and take it to the next level.

With this book, you will:

• Finally understand project management jargon
• Maximize your team's productivity with Scrum
• Visualize your workflows with Kanban boards
• Learn the step-by-step process of managing agile projects
• Grow and scale your thriving business!

 

The agile mindset is your key to maximum productivity and genuine leadership. It's your key to innovation and success (and making more money in the process). You can use it to manage everything from your personal projects to a thriving corporation - Agile is scalable, flexible, and empowering.

In fact, you don't even have to be a software developer to use agile methods! Agile project management can be used in all fields and industries - so dive in and transform your business now!

 

Get your copy now!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip Small
• Release date: Sep 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201741280

Book preview

Introduction

Image result for agile benefits

THESE DAYS, IT ALMOST feels like agile project management is on everyone’s lips. The term gets tossed around with so much ardor (among those who are for it and those who are against it) that we have almost lost its meaning altogether. 

Agile is about a lot more than just hanging out in circles every day and playing little games when it comes to splitting larger tasks into smaller ones. 

Agile was born with a reason — but even more than that, it was born in a time and for a time that needed a drastic change in approach. 

Although Agile methodologies (like Kanban, for example) have been practiced for many decades already, agile project management — in its raw, official format — was born a little under two decades ago. 

But in terms of adaptability, agile has won the long-term game, and it is now one of the rulers in the world of project management.

How much of a ruler is it, really? 

Studies show that about 30% of projects use a clear agile approach, while approximately 40% of them use a traditional/Waterfall approach. The remaining 30% use a hybrid approach (Getapp, 2019) — which, contrary to what some may believe, doesn’t show that Waterfall has won the race, but that it needs agile adjustments to function in the modern world. 

We invite you on a journey of learning and discovery, at the end of which you will discover which version of agile works best for you and for your organization. 

History of Agile

Together with the advent of modern technology and computers, a lot of things had to be done — and more importantly, they had to be done fast, accurately, and within the budget. 

Agile methods started to take shape as early as the 1950s, but it wasn’t until five decades later that the famous Agile Manifesto was laid on paper. 

Sometime around the mid-‘90s, most of what is now known as agile project management began to be contoured. At first, it was all dispersed — there was RAD (Rapid Application Development) in 1991, Scrum in 1995, and Feature-Driven Development two years later. 

In 2001, it all came together, as if to offer clarity to a world that was getting ready to make a full jump into the one channel that rules them all today: the Internet. Sure, web connections had existed before, but it was at the turn of the millennia when things started to really take off. 

In this background, seventeen brilliant software development minds got together in Snowbird, Utah. That meeting would go down in history, as this was when the actual concepts of agile project management took their official form. 

We would be very curious to know exactly how that meeting went. We do know it didn’t come out of the blue (you cannot simply expect the forward-thinkers in software development to just accidentally come together in Utah, can you?). 

And we also know that the Snowbird meeting set the grounds for everything that followed in the world of agile project management. We would go as far as to assume that a lot of the amazing software tools we use today on a recurrent basis now would not have existed — they would have lingered somewhere, still in development. 

Agile project management was born because there was a dire need to alter the project management landscape in software development. Back in the ‘90s, when the demand for software increased, traditional project management methods proved to be inefficient (at best) and downright disastrous (at worst). 

In fact, it is frequently mentioned that most of the (major!) software development houses had (equally major!) lag when it came to their releases. On average, software development was lagging by approximately three years. For large projects, the lag extended further, up to 20 years. 

It sounds preposterous, and it is. 

But that’s just what Waterfall did to these projects. The very nature of software development is ever-changing, so it made no sense at all to stick to a management approach that focused on spreadsheets, more than the very core of what these projects did. 

Furthermore, as you will see throughout the entire book, the Waterfall-Agile hybrids have also ensured the streamlining of the Waterfall processes, taking the best of the two worlds and providing organizations based on heavy documentation with an alternative to traditional project management. 

Agile project management was born at the right time to become the backbone of the tech industry before it boomed completely. 

From Silicon Valley to China, and from Iceland to Australia, Agile has become a household name in project management. Even more, it has expanded well beyond the borders of software programming and is now used in pretty much every industry you could imagine. Hospitals, schools, governmental and non-governmental institutions, marketing, translations — everyone can embrace Agile, precisely because it is so flexible and adaptable to multiple situations. 

History is rarely written when we expect it. We don’t know if those seventeen minds actually knew the kind of impact their meeting would have — but we do know that software development and Agile are so intertwined these days that it seems almost impossible to completely separate them. 

Advantages of Agile Project Management

Enough with the praises, though! 

If you are reading this book, it is quite likely that you have already heard about how great Agile is and the miracles it can bring about. 

What makes Agile project management so good, specifically? 

There is a long list of benefits that bring Agile project management to everyone’s attention — specifically those in software project management, but most definitely not exclusively so. 

Better Quality

One of the main tenets of Agile project management is that it promises better product quality. 

To get things straight, it’s not that products developed via Waterfall project management lack in quality. It’s just that it is far more likely for an Agile-developed product to be qualitative by the point of its full release on the market. 

There is a very strong logic behind this. 

On the one hand, Waterfall project management tends to be too strict within its own limits. This means that it is far more likely for mistakes to: 

●       Be noticed too far out in the process (and Waterfall will not allow the team to reiterate the same feature/part of the project) 

Agile project management is very focused on continuous improvement. As such, a product has a much higher chance of actually getting better throughout the development process. 

Or, in other words, instead of sweeping all those small (or not so small) mistakes under the rug (as you would do in Waterfall project management because you have to follow the plan), you will just deal with them there and then. 

Sounds much more feasible, right? 

Better Customer Satisfaction

Another reason that makes Agile so advantageous is related to the fact that, by the end of the project, customers tend to be far more satisfied. 

How so? 

There are a few verticals to consider when it comes to customer satisfaction, and Agile makes sure that all of them are properly met. For instance: 

●       Agile will allow you to change the requirements as per client feedback. 

●       Agile will force you to release bits of the project as you move along, ergo, it will allow your customer to provide you with input that is easier to implement (due to the small size of the actual bit they are testing).

Given all these factors, it makes all the sense in the world that customers will be happier — throughout the project, as they will be able to request the modifications they need and, at the end of it, as they will receive a product that fits their requirements, purposes, and desires. 

Do keep in mind that the same stands true in those cases when the customer is an internal stakeholder — such as, for example, when you are managing a software development project meant to be used internally. 

Better Transparency

This Agile benefit is very tightly connected to what has been mentioned already. When you can ensure better quality and better customer satisfaction, it all comes with greater transparency. 

This transparency will manifest itself in all the verticals of project management. You will see better transparency in your team (and, as you will see later on in the book, Agile has developed internal mechanisms and tools you can use to ensure this happens). 

You will also see better transparency within the organization, regardless of whether or not the upper management uses the same project management approach as you do. 

Finally, you will see better transparency between you and your customer (be it an internal one or an external one). When you constantly ask for feedback and continually improve the product to suit your customer’s needs, you create a more genuine relationship with them. You start to truly communicate, rather than engaging in nothing more than ping-pong emails. 

Better Control

For those of you used to the premises of Waterfall or traditional project management, it might seem that Agile is anything but control-focused. 

In fact, it very much is. 

Agile project management allows you to control your project at a granular level, precisely because it encourages (and downright forces) you to split your project into small, bite-sized bits and pieces. 

Waterfall project management