Making Agile Work for Your Business

Course details

In many areas, "Agile is becoming a hot new buzz word and everyone wants to jump on the "Agile bandwagon without necessarily fully understanding why they're getting into it and exactly what they expect to get out of it. While Agile has huge potential benefits for a business, it's important to not get carried away with some of the hype that exists about Agile and develop an objective understanding of its benefits and limitations to know how and when to apply it successfully. The right approach is to not necessarily to just implement Agile for the sake of becoming Agile; but figure out how it's going to help your business and what problems it will solve.

A decision to migrate to Agile should not be taken lightly because it can have significant impact on a business that have existing management practices based on traditional, plan-driven practices. Although Agile will cause us to rethink many things we've taken for granted about a traditional, plan-driven project management approach; there is still a need for traditional plan-driven project management in many situations and the two approaches can be blended together as necessary when required. The best solution is generally to design an approach that is appropriate for your business rather than force-fitting your business to some kind of canned, "textbook approach (whatever it might be Agile or not).

That is the essence of two books I've already published on Agile Project Management and a third book that I'm publishing at this time. The typical questions and challenges this poses for business managers and executives are:

• How do I reconcile an Agile development approach with my existing business management and project management processes?
• Do I need to unravel all of my existing management processes in order to adopt an Agile development approach?

This course will help you answer those questions and includes assessment tools and planning tools to help you develop a very effective Agile Project Management approach that is very well-aligned with your business.