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INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the Agile Practice Guide! This guide was developed as a collaborative effort by the Project Management Institute (PMI) and Agile Alliance®. The members of the core writing team who developed this practice guide included volunteers from both organizations, drawing on subject matter expertise from a broad range of current practitioners and leaders from a diverse range of backgrounds, beliefs, and cultures.

This practice guide provides practical guidance geared toward project leaders and team members adapting to an agile approach in planning and executing projects. While our core writing team recognizes there is staunch support to use predictive approaches and conversely, passion around shifting to an agile mindset, values, and principles, this practice guide covers a practical approach to project agility. This practice guide represents a bridge to understanding the pathway from a predictive approach to an agile approach. In fact, there are similar activities between the two, such as planning, that are handled differently but occur in both environments.

Our core writing team used an agile mindset to collaborate and manage the development of this first edition of the practice guide. As technology and culture changes, future updates and refinements to the practice guide will reflect current approaches.

Our core team adopted a more informal, relaxed writing style for this practice guide than is typical for PMI standards. The guide incorporates new elements, such as tips, sidebars, and case studies to better illustrate key points and concepts. Our team intends for these changes to make this practice guide more readable and user-friendly.

This practice guide goes beyond addressing the use of agile in the computer software development industry, because agile has expanded into non-software development environments. Manufacturing, education, healthcare and other industries are becoming agile to varying degrees and this use beyond software is within the scope of this practice guide.

So why an Agile Practice Guide and why now? Project teams have used agile techniques and approaches in various forms for at least several decades. The Agile Manifesto [1]¹ expressed definitive values and principles of agile as the use of agile gained substantial momentum (see Section 2.1). Today, project leaders and teams find themselves in an environment disrupted by exponential advances in technology and demands from customers for more immediate delivery of value. Agile techniques and approaches effectively manage disruptive technologies. In addition, the first principle of agile places customer satisfaction as the highest priority and is key in delivering products and services that delight customers (see Section 2.1). Rapid and transparent customer feedback loops are readily available with the widespread use of social media. Therefore, in order to stay competitive and relevant, organizations can no longer be internally focused but rather need to focus outwardly to the customer experience.

Disruptive technologies are rapidly changing the playing field by decreasing the barriers to entry. More mature organizations are increasingly prone to being highly complex and potentially slow to innovate, and lag behind in delivering new solutions to their customers. These organizations find themselves competing with smaller organizations and startups that are able to rapidly produce products that fit customer needs. This speed of change will continue to drive large organizations to adopt an agile mindset in order to stay competitive and keep their existing market share.

The Agile Practice Guide is project-focused and addresses project life cycle selection, implementing agile, and organizational considerations for agile projects. Organizational change management (OCM) is essential for implementing or transforming practices but, since OCM is a discipline within itself, it is outside the scope of this practice guide. Those seeking guidance in OCM may refer to Managing Change in Organizations—A Practice Guide [2].

Additional items that are in scope and out of scope for this practice guide are listed in Table 1-1.

Table 1-1. In-Scope and Out-of-Scope Items

This practice guide is for project teams who find themselves in the messy middle-ground between predictive and agile approaches, who are trying to address rapid innovation and complexity, and who are dedicated to the team's improvement. This practice guide provides useful guidance for successful projects that deliver business value to meet customer expectations and needs.

This practice guide is organized as follows:

Section 2 An Introduction to Agile—This section includes the Agile Manifesto mindset, values, and principles. It also covers the concepts of definable and high-uncertainty work, and the correlation between lean, the Kanban Method, and agile approaches.

Section 3 Life Cycle Selection—This section introduces the various life cycles discussed in this practice guide. This section also addresses suitability filters, tailoring guidelines, and common combinations of approaches.

Section 4 Implementing Agile: Creating an Agile Environment—This section discusses critical factors to consider when creating an agile environment such as servant leadership and team composition.

Section 5 Implementing Agile: Delivering in an Agile Environment—This section includes information on how to organize teams and common practices teams can use for delivering value on a regular basis. It provides examples of empirical measurements for teams and for reporting status.

Section 6 Organizational Considerations for Project Agility—This section explores organizational factors that impact the use of agile approaches, such as culture, readiness, business practices, and the role of a PMO.

Section 7 A Call to Action—The call to action requests input for continuous improvement of this practice guide.

The annexes, appendixes, references, bibliography, and glossary provide additional useful information and definitions:

• Annexes. Contain mandatory information that is too lengthy for inclusion in the main body of the practice guide.
• Appendixes. Contain nonmandatory information that supplements the main body of this practice guide.
• References. Identify where to locate standards and other publications that are cited in this practice guide.
• Bibliography. Lists additional publications by section that provide detailed information on topics covered in this practice guide.
• Glossary. Presents a list of terms and their definitions that are used in this practice guide.

¹ The numbers in brackets refer to the list of references at the end of this practice guide.