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Title: Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products (Agile Software Development Series)
ISBN: 0321219775
Author:
Jim Highsmith
Publicate Date: 2004-04-16
Publish: 2004-04-16
List Price: $49.99
Average Customer Rating: 5.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $28.46
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $24.99
Amazon Merchant Price: $43.52
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| Customer Review: |
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1: articulate and concise
This book is not only good for project managers but also an excellent read for developers. In the real world it is not uncommon that developers would confront a manager who likes to micromanage and everything the developers do have to be conform to something really bureaucracy and with little or no business sense or tech sense. In this book, the value of APM is well articulated in concise sentences. These sentences can be powerful tool when it is necessary for R&D people to discuss/argue with a manager about things like project plan/report, etc. There is also practical method of APM. I find this book very articulate and concise. Highly recommended.
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2: A bit disappointing
This book is well-written and provides both a good explanation of agile software development and insights into how to manage such a project. My disappointment comes from fact that Highsmith emphasizes that one has to find the right people in order to succeed with this kind of project, and doesn't provide much info about how to identify the right people or how to train people with potential to work this way. Given the emphasis on the importance of the right team, more space in the book should be devoted to that aspect of management.
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3: A Practical Guide
I picked up Agile Project Management because I haven't done any agile projects in a while and wanted to update my knowledge to help with an upcoming project. I found the book a good combination of theory and practical activities that a project manager can use in an agile project. The book steps through each of the processes, explains the theory, then steps through tools that can be used for that process. I recommend this book for anyone new to agile project management, including experienced project managers looking to expand their toolkit.
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4: Takes human behavior into account
As someone who has managed large custom software projects and programs for 20 years, I was concerned that applying Agile to project management would simply mean burndown charts and the like. What I found in Highsmith's book is a perceptive understanding of how people think, feel and actually work on projects. Approaches that take human behavior into account, in my experience, are far more successful than those that don't.
The concepts covered here, if really absorbed and understood, can benefit any project. I found Chapter 7 to be the most valuable for my current product development team, and ordered copies of the book for all my managers.
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5: Good on principles, but practices could be more dev-related
This book is a thoroughly enjoyable read, from the emphasis on principles, the excellent job navigating the difficult territory of the line between prescribed process and anarchy, and the stages a team goes through as it embraces an agile style of development. I even thought that the hypothetical story added a nice element of repetition to each section that helped drive home the main points.
The one thing I would've liked was for this book to get off the fence and decide to be software-related. Almost every example is software related (except for the basketball analogy that got beaten to death...), but it goes out of the way not to specify software practices because this is about arbitrary project management. The book's in the "Agile Software Development Series" and the author is primarily a software consultant. I'd prefer it stuck to software rather than trying to go for broader appeal because there were several practice areas where detail was elided on that basis and could've really helped make the practices more concrete.
Also, it would've been nice to have a little grid mapping up common-day software development methodologies like Scrum, XP, FDD, and DSDM against the practices in the book. I tried to do it in my head, but once you get past 5x5, it's something that should've been provided.
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