Quotes About Development

Agile Project Management -like its lean development counterparts- streamlines the development process, concentrating on value-adding activities and eliminating overhead and compliance activities.

The iterative piece of agile can be defined by four key terms: iterative, feature-based, timeboxed, and incremental.

APM's core purpose of creating innovative new products and services means dealing with constant technological and competitive change, generating novel ideas, and continually reducing product development schedules.

The feature delivery approach helps define a workable interface between customers and product developers.

Iterative development, when accompanied with reasonable end-of-iteration reviews—product, technical, process, team—is also self-correcting.

Driving exploration is critical, but knowing when to stop is also. Product development is exploring with a purpose, delivering value within a set of constraints. Frequent, timeboxed iterations compel the development and product teams and executives to make difficult tradeoff decisions early and often during the project. Feature delivery contributes to realistic evaluations because product managers can look at tangible, verifiable results.

In my early years of iterative development, I thought timeboxes were actually about time. What I came to realize is that timeboxes are actually about forcing tough decisions.

Project leaders need to focus on value in several ways: value determination (with product owners), value prioritization (backlog management), and value creation (iterative development).

The agile value "Delivering Value over Meeting Constraints" provides a focus for rethinking how we measure performance on projects. Although constraints such as cost and time are important, they should be secondary to creating value for customers. All too often, we focus on what is easily measurable and ignore really important characteristics that are harder to quantify. Agile development attempts to change that bias and focus on the most important things, and value is at the top of that list.

A team can employ agile practices, but it won't achieve the potential benefit of agile development without embracing agile values and principles.

Executives, project leaders, and development teams must embrace a different view of the new product development world, one that not only recognizes change in the business world, but also understands the power of driving down iteration costs to enable experimentation and emergent processes. Understanding these differences and how they affect product development is key to understanding APM.

The ability to respond to change is good. The ability to create change for competitors is even better. When you create change you are on the competitive offensive. When you respond to competitors' changes you are on the defensive. When you can respond to change at any point in the development lifecycle, even late, then you have a distinct advantage.

Optimization implies that we already know how to do something but that we now need to improve it. Innovation implies that we don't know how to do something, and searching for that knowledge is paramount.

Anyone who practices ad hoc development under the guise of agile methods is an imposter.

The essence of Agile movement, whether in new product development, new service offerings, software applications, or project management, rests on two foundational goals: delivering valuable products to customers and creating working environments in which people look forward to coming to work each day.

People don't change that much. Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That is hard enough (Buckingham and Coffman 1999).

Creating change requires innovation: developing new products, creating new sales channels, reducing product development time, customizing products for increasingly smaller market segments. In addition, your company must be able to respond quickly to both anticipated and unanticipated changes created by your competitors and customers.

When teachers stop learning, so do students.

Seek out incremental wins. Instead of immediately revolutionizing the company, start small and crush a few things first; once you've earned trust, you will garner bigger responsibilities and influence.

Mentorship is Instrumental.

Mentorship is the greatest level of leadership maturity there is.

Embrace mentorship. Rely on others to assist you, provide feedback, challenge your thinking and celebrate you; this is one of the greatest growth paths for leaders.

Create your inner circle. Identify four to five irreplaceable, intentional mentors in your life and formally develop those relationships; choose people who already have a vested interest in your success.

If securing some mentors and being one yourself are not already on your leadership list of things to do, let's get at it. It's too important for your career to ignore.