Agile Project Management – 10 Golden Rules

Successful Application of Approaches such as DSDM Atern and RAD is Underpinned by Essential Rules

Agile project management specialist, Keith Richards, has distilled 10 golden rules based on his personal experience of facilitating and leading agile projects in hundreds of organisations. He shared these at the recent Best Practice User Group Showcase in London.

1. Define the project objective in less than 10 words
- all team members should be able to write it on a post-it note
2. Build a team with those who can say “can”
- “if you think you can’t, you can’t” (Carol Bartz)
3. Go slow early to go fast
- do enough design up front
4. Look backwards to go forwards
- learn lessons along the way
5. Change is great!
- Agile techniques are designed to handle changing requirements
6. To be understood, seek first to understand
- A great bit of philosophy from Stephen Covey
7. Collect actuals – this is the oxygen for your project
- You can’t control what you can’t measure (Tom DeMarco)
8. Use fat communications channels
- Go Face to Face!
9. Work hard at controlling what you can’t control
- Or at least control the consequences of what you can’t control
10. One more day? NO.
- Zero time tolerance – this is the NUMBER ONE rule

>> DSDM courses at Focus
>> PRINCE2 courses at Focus
>> Buy ‘Agile Project Management: running PRINCE2 projects with DSDM Atern’ by Keith Richards
>> Focus LinkedIn group

Blogalot  June 2009