PMI-ACP Certification: Leading an Agile Team

The Agile Manifesto and Agile Principles

Teams that use an agile approach adopt a much more flexible and interactive approach to development than those using a purely traditional approach, with all players taking an active role in the process. Accordingly, the project manager fills a different role and has a different focus.

Agile Team Roles

Agile project leaders need a particular mindset. They need to view the customer as a collaborator and embrace the idea of continuous improvement. They need to think of themselves as having two roles - servant-leader and facilitator. And they need to view any project as a complex adaptive system, or CAS.

Although the success of any project depends on an effective project team, the team plays an especially critical role in an agile project. In a traditionally managed project, team members follow through on what has already been planned - but in an agile project, the team drives and shapes the project as work proceeds.

Attributes of Successful Agile Teams

In some cases, agile teams may fail to function effectively. The causes for these failures can be categorized as either management weaknesses or team dysfunctions

Email versus face-to-face conversation

In agile development, it is ideal to have small teams with colocated members, but this may not always be possible. The reality of the work world today is that many companies use multinational teams, with members who are widely distributed geographically. This poses special challenges in terms of managing the agile development process.

Understand the role of project manager in an agile project and the characteristics of agile teams

Although an agile team may be self-organized and even self-managed, it still requires leadership, support, and encouragement. So coaching plays an important role. This applies especially when a team is new or working on a complex project.

An agile coach focuses on maximizing both team and individual performance, and mentors team members in applying agile practices in their daily work. The coach also models agile values and shares agile experiences with the team.

One of the key responsibilities of an agile project leader is to recognize when a team isn't performing at its best and then help it to boost its performance. As a project leader, you can use several strategies to do this. Among these are to make it clear you expect high performance and technical excellence from the team, quickly identify and fix problems, and ensure that team members are energized.

For an agile team to be highly productive, its members have to be able to identify and fix problems quickly. Various obstacles can prevent this. They include:

• having team members working in isolation,
• a culture of tolerating defects,
• a project leader who tries to solve problems instead of allowing team members to do this themselves.

Another strategy for improving a team's performance is to ensure that its team members are energized. Energized team members are excited, focused, and actively seek opportunities to improve. To remain energized, team members need to maintain a balance, both physically and emotionally

Recognize strategies for boosting team performance and get ready for coaching your team

Course project (optional)

Course wrap-up and conclusions.

Course wrap-up and optional project

In Lean project management waste, or the Japanese term Muda, is defined as any activity or process that doesn't add value to a product but does add cost. Lean's original Seven Forms of Waste include transportation, inventory, motion, waiting, overprocessing, overproduction, and defects. The new eighth form of waste is skills or non-utilized talent. 

In a Pull-based system, the customer demand creates what is called pull. Production or development relies on pull rather than on complicated market forecast to determine how many products to deliver.

A Kanban board is a tool that agile teams often use to visualize workflow through a system. While Kanban principles are often used in IT and software development, they can be helpful in any industry.

In lean project management, one of the key concepts is process improvement. Lead time and cycle time are two important metrics that help determine how lean a process is. In other words, how much of the time dedicated to creating a product is value added. 

Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy that focuses on reducing waste and implementing a flow-based production line rather than a batch and queue method. It's aimed at reducing costs and improving overall customer value. 

In order to maintain a stable process with minimal chaos organizations should attempt to minimize work in progress or WIP in their processes. One way to do this is by setting WIP limits. WIP limits help to reduce bottlenecks, improve the rate of throughput, and control the workload levels of project team members. 

Stakeholder engagement is a fundamental part of project management. It's important to be able to express the product vision to stakeholders in order to gain support in common understanding about the product requirements. The product owner often collaborates with other key stakeholders to develop a product vision. 

With today's modern technology there are a variety of tools to bring teams together virtually. 

This course covers the key exam concepts of Kanban, work in progress or WIP, lead time, cycle time, and Little's Law. You'll also learn about Agile Team Spaces, sharing the product vision, and identifying and reducing defects.

This course covers the key exam concepts of Kanban, work in progress or WIP, lead time, cycle time, and Little's Law. You'll also learn about Agile Team Spaces, sharing the product vision, and identifying and reducing defects.

PMI Certification Info