The next big transformation came with the development of machines and factories, when people left their farms and villages to move into cities.
This was the Industrial Revolution, which eventually led to the development of many classic project management tools and concepts, including Gantt charts, functional decomposition, and localized labor. In turn, these developments led to the creation of more advanced project management tools, such as the work breakdown structure WBS. The latest stage—which we are in now—is known as the Information Revolution. This revolution is focused on information and collaboration, rather than manufacturing.
It places value on the ownership of knowledge and the ability to use that knowledge to create or improve goods and services. The InformationRevolution relies on knowledge workers. These are people with subject matter expertise who communicate their knowledge and take part in analysis or development efforts.
Knowledge workers are not only found in the IT industry; they are also engineers, teachers, scientists, lawyers, doctors, writers, and many others employed today.
In fact, knowledge workers have become the largest segment of the North American workforce. When you are finished, look at the pattern of the check marks. Are they mostly on the left industrial work or mostly on the right knowledge work? Knowledge Work Industrial Work Work is visible Work is stable Emphasis is on running things More structure with fewer decisions Focus on the right answers Define the task Command and control Strict standards Focus on quantity Measure performance to strict standards Minimize cost of workers for a task Work is invisible Work is changing Emphasis is on changing things Less structure with more decisions Focus on the right questions Understand the task Give autonomy Continuous innovation Focus on quality Continuously learn and teach Treat workers as assets, not as costs When knowledge work projects became more common, people found that the communication and collaboration involved in these projects made the work more uncertain and less definable thanindustrial work.
As people tried to apply industrial work techniques to knowledge work projects, frustration—and project failures —increased.
Agile methods were developed in response to this problem. Agile pioneers collected the most effective techniques for knowledge work and adapted them for use on projects, experimenting to see what worked best. This new initiative began in the software development field, but is now used in allkinds ofknowledge work projects.
As a result, agile has multiple methodologies that use different terminology. Defined versus Empirical Processes Another way of looking at the difference between knowledge work and industrial work is to examine the different kinds of processes they use.
Industrial work typically uses a defined process, while knowledge work relies on an empirical process. In a defined process, as the name implies, we can define the constituent steps in advance. If we know the optimum way to tie our shoelaces, then we can follow the same process each time. This is typically the most efficient way to proceed for a well-understood project in an unchanging environment, such as construction projects that use well-understood materials and building approaches.
In fact, most industrial projects can be planned and managed by using a defined approach. Other processes are not as well defined. When faced with a new or uncertain process, such as building an underwater home for the first time or using carbonnanotubes instead of steel, there will be many unknowns and uncertainties involved in the risks and solutions required for the new environment or materials.
When faced with such uncertainty, a process of trial and experiment is required to determine what works, surface issues, and incrementally build on small successes. The resulting process will be iterative and incremental, with frequent reviews and adaptation. The result is an empirical process. This approach is required for projects where the execution stage is characterized by uncertainty andrisks —in other words, projects that would benefit from the agile approach.
Agility really involves adopting a new mindset—way of thinking—that is based on agile values and principles. This document outlines six precepts:2 1. We increase return on investment by making continuous flow of value our focus. We deliver reliable results by engaging customers in frequent interactions and shared ownership. We expect uncertainty and manage for it through iterations, anticipation, and adaptation.
We unleash creativity and innovation by recognizing that individuals are the ultimate source of value, and creating an environment where they can make a difference. We boost performance through group accountability for results and shared responsibility for team effectiveness. We improve effectiveness and reliability through situationally specific strategies, processes, and practices. Read through these six statements again and see if you understand them. Do they make sense to you?
If this mindset sounds very different from the working environment you are used to, then you will need to carefully study this chapter in order to do well on the exam.
We actually have to take the agile mindset to heart and use it to guide our approach. Applying agile values and principles to how we use agile methods changes not only our approach, but also the effectiveness of the practices. Doing agile involves using agile practices without embracing the agile mindset that allows us to understand how to select the right balance of practices and tailor them appropriately. Here we start by internalizing the agile mindset welcoming change, small increments, etc.
We start with a good understanding of why we are using the practices, which in turn helps us understand how to use them most effectively. Here, we jump directly into the how of agile without first understanding the why. This is a common problem in agile adoption. To some, agile values will be intuitively easy to grasp —they seem to describe familiar beliefs andbehavior patterns.
To others, these values will have to be consciously learned and then actively practiced before they can be understood and accepted.
Regardless ofhowthis understanding develops, the more people there are in an organization who embrace and act upon agile principles, the more effective agile practices will be. However, they will feel inhibited or misunderstood by other groups or systems in the organization, such as the project management office PMO or functional silos.
Although organizational agility is the ideal goal, today most organizations are not there yet. So how can we help our organizations get there? The way organizations change is through influence exerted by individuals. The diagram below depicts the steps involved in this process as the layers of an onion skin.
Figure 1. Only once we fully understand the agile mindset can we move on to the next step. Do Doingis the practice of agile. For example, this might involve visualizing work items, using short iterations, or building in feedback and improvement steps. Once we understand and can practice these steps ourselves, we can move on to the next step, where we begin influencing others.
Encourage Others This final step involves encouraging others to become agile. Although this may appear to be exponentially harder to achieve than the first two steps, it is also the most worthwhile when accomplished. Also, the more people in your circle of work you can successfully educate about the merits of agile, the more allies you will have in advocating the cause. The end result of this process can be a complete transformation of the organization based on agile principles.
So your study goals should be, first, to fully absorb the agile mindset and then, second, to become generally familiar with agile tools and practices. This triangle, shown below, was introduced in the first edition of the DSDM Manual, published in In other words, we aim to deliver the most value we can by X date within X budget.
This is why we need to determine acceptable operating boundaries, which usually take the form of cost and time constraints. For a project such as this, we could continue adding and tweaking our lessonmaterial and exercises indefinitely. Instead we need to get to an acceptable performance point, and then have the discipline to stop.
The Agile Manifesto was created during a meeting in February that brought together a number of software and methodology experts who were in the forefront of the emerging agile methods. We are including this information to set the context for the discussion that follows. The exam will focus on your ability to apply the values and principles set forth in this document in situational questions.
Tliis section of the document reads as follows:3 Manifestofor Agile Software Development We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change overfollowing a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
While the Agile Manifesto is simple in structure and sparse in words, there is a lot of good stuff in these four values. Understanding the ideas conveyed in these values is important not just for the exam, but also for the application of an agile approach on any kind of knowledge work project.
As you read about the Manifesto, look beyond the specific terms and think about how these concepts apply to other types of knowledge work. It is both more subtle and more powerful—it guides us to consider projects from a value-based perspective. Yes, we will need processes, tools, documentation, and plans on our projects. Yet while dealing with these assets, we should remember that our focus must be on the people engaged, the product we are building, cooperation, and flexibility.
Agility is the capacity to execute projects while focusing our efforts on the items on the left side of these value statements, rather than those on the right.
This is because projects are undertaken by people, not tools, and problems get solved by people, not processes. Focusing early on developing the individuals involved in the project and emphasizingproductive and effective interactions help set up a project for success. This is not to say that processes and tools cannot help in successfully completing a project. They are certainly important assets, and for those of us who have an engineering background, we may naturally tend toward the logic and predictability of processes and tools.
Yet projects are ultimately about people, so to be successful, we need to spend the majority of our time in what may be the less comfortable, messy, and unpredictable world of people.
This value reminds us to focus on the purpose or business value were trying to deliver, rather than paperwork. This keeps most of our efforts focused on the emerging system. However, it pays to be smart, too — given the limited time and effort available on a project, we need to decide where to best focus our energy, and which battles to pursue. Software without documentation is certainly problematic and hampers support and maintenance.
But comprehensive documentation without software has no value in most organizations. So this emphasis on valuing working software over comprehensive documentation acts as a necessary and useful reminder of why these projects are commissioned in the first place — to build something useful. Documentation by itself, or at the expense of working software, is not useful. Value 3: Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation This value reminds us to be flexible and accommodating, rather than fixed and uncooperative.
It is notoriously difficult to define an up-front, unchanging view of what shouldbe built. This challenge stems from the dynamic nature of knowledge work products, especially software systems; software is intangible and difficult to reference, companies rarely build the same systems twice, business needs change quickly, and technology changes rapidly. Value 4: Responding to Change Over Following a Plan In knowledge work projects, we know that our initial plans are inadequate, since they are based on insufficient information about what it will take to complete the project.
So instead of investing effort in trying to bring the project back in line with our original plan, we want to spend more of our effort and energy responding to the changes that will inevitably arise. We stillneed to plan, but we also need to acknowledge that our initial plans were made when we knew least about the project at the beginning and will need to be updated as the work progresses.
The importance of responding to change over following a plan is particularly true for software projects, where high rates of change are common. Again, instead of suppressing changes and spending a lot of time managing and tracking a largely static plan, we need to acknowledge that things will change. Agile projects have highly visible queues of work and plans in the form of backlogs and task boards.
The intent of this value is to broaden the number of people who can be readily engaged in the planning process by adjusting the plans and discussing the impact of changes.
Draw arrows to match the start of the Agile Manifesto values on the left to their correct endings on the right. This part of the Manifesto reads as follows:4 Principles behind the Agile Manifesto Wefollow these principles: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness changefor the customer's competitive advantage. Deliver working softwarefrequently,from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
Buildprojects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. Working software is the primary measure ofprogress. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. Continuous attention to technical excellence andgood design enhances agility. Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done —is essential.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emergefrom self-organizing teams. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
In such instances, look for the answer that best matches the Agile Manifesto values and principles. Again, although the principles may use software development terms, as you read about them, think about how these concepts apply to other types of knowledge work projects. Principle 1: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
This principle includes three main points. The first is to satisfy the customer. If we produce perfect plans and documentation, but only delight the project management office PMO or the quality assurance QA group, we have failed; our focus shouldbe on the customer. The second point is early and continuous delivery.
We must structure the project and the development team to deliver value early and frequently. This can be a struggle if people are reluctant to share incomplete work, and it takes courage and support for everyone to become comfortable with this idea. However, we must achieve this point if we are to learn of problems while we still have time to fix them. It is better to get something wrong up front andhave time to correct it than to discover the issue much later when so much more has been built on top of a faulty foundation.
The final point is that what we are delivering is valuable software i. We need to stay focused on the end goal. For software projects, this is the software; for other types of projects, the end goal will be the product or service that the project was undertaken to deliver or enhance. Changes can be great for a project— for example, if they allow us to deliver a late-breaking,high-priority feature.
Many non-agile projects have such rigorous change control procedures that only the highest priorities make it through. On such projects, much of the time and effort is spent logging and managing change requests. This kind of rigorous change management is problematic for any project in a highly changeable environment, such as software development—so agile accepts that changes will occur.
By welcoming the changes that will inevitably happen and setting up an efficient way to deal with them, we can spend more time developing the end product. Principle 3: Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
However, we are doing ourselves a disservice by holding on to our work for too long. This principle emphasizes the importance of releasing work to a test environment and getting feedback. Frequent testing and feedback are so important that software developers use continuous integration tools to provide feedback about any code they have written that breaks thebuild.
Agile teams need feedback on what they have created thus far to see if they can proceed, or if a change of course is needed. Delivering within a short timeframe also has the benefit of keeping the product owner engaged and keeping dialogue about the project going.
With frequent deliveries, we will regularly have results to show the customer and opportunities to get feedback. Often at these demos, we learn of new requirements or changes in business priorities that are valuable planning inputs. Principle 4: Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
The frequent demos mentioned above are one example of how the business representatives and developers work together throughout the project. Daily face-to-face engagement with the customer is one of the most difficult principles to ensure from a practical standpoint, but it is really worth pushing for. Written documents, e-mails, and even telephone calls are less efficient ways of transferring information than face-to-face interactions.
By working with business representatives daily, we can learn about the business in a way that is far beyond what a collection of requirements-gathering meetings can ever achieve. As a result, we are better able to suggest solutions and alternatives to business requests. For someone--me! I don't know how other books compare, but I don't know why you would even bother looking at anything else.
The exercises were one of the biggest aides for me--they really solidified the concepts in my mind. My suggestion would be to not waste your time studying with a bunch of materials from different points of view. Read this one book and be done! I also have to disagree with the negative review about the small font and wide margins because I took lots of notes, which I wouldn't have been able to comfortably do without those wider margins.
Woo hoo!!! Mike was part of the committee who created the exam therefore has a deep understanding of the framework of the exam. The exam is based on 11 core books. I am often asked "Do I need to read all 11 books? To help you focus on the exam, Mike's exam prep book covers the key pieces of each book.
In addition Mike covers the PMI's Professional Responsibility and Ethics, and how to prepare for the exam which is not covered in the 11 core books. I believe Mike's book will stay relevant as exam questions are added to the database of questions. Other guides provided good coverage of the initial pilot set of questions, but may not fully prepare you as the exam evolves.
If you want to know more about the creation of the exam, check out the Webinar. Our first course actually was developed from the 11 books and predated the issuing of this tome by RMC Training. Having gone on that personal journey Griffiths' book remains a source of amazement as he neatly binds together so many complex project management concepts and succeeds in covering many topics missed or sparsely covered in the original 11 book, 4, page reading recommendation to sit for the PMI-ACP Certification.
This book is the optimal study guide for the certification exam. Strongly recommend buying the entire exam system including the flash cards and the pass track exam system to assure you pass the test. Also note that early in this book Griffiths holds forth on the content of the original Interestingly the authors of the original 11 write forwards for Griffiths.
Their assertion that this book stands alone as a great Agile project management resource is clearly true. Buy it even if you have not interest in the test but want to "see Agile". Posting Komentar. Minggu, 29 Agustus [W Most helpful customer reviews 35 of 36 people found the following review helpful.
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