Welcome to the Agile Practice Guide! This guide is a collaborative effort by the Project Management Institute (PMI) and Agile Alliance, developed to provide practical guidance to project leaders and team members who are adapting to an agile approach in planning and executing projects.
The core writing team of this practice guide consisted of volunteers from both organizations, who drew on subject matter expertise from a broad range of current practitioners and leaders from diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and cultures. The guide provides a bridge to understanding the pathway from a predictive approach to an agile approach.
Agile has expanded beyond software development and has been adopted by various industries, such as manufacturing, education, and healthcare. The guide covers agile-based learning, which is a fertile ground to expand agile practices beyond software development. Agile techniques can create a culture of learning that focuses on prioritizing competing priorities, face-to-face interaction, meaningful learning, self-organizing teams, and incremental and/or iterative learning that exploit imagination.
The adoption of agile techniques and approaches is necessary to manage disruptive technologies, which have decreased barriers to entry, especially enabled by the transition to cloud computing. Companies across the globe leverage cloud computing to gain quick and cheap access to computing resources and to gain entry into traditional markets. This speed of change will continue to drive large organizations to adopt an agile mindset to stay competitive and keep their existing market share.
The Agile Practice Guide is project-focused and addresses project life cycle selection, implementing agile, and organizational considerations for agile projects. It covers the most popular agile approaches listed in industry surveys and incorporates new elements, such as tips, sidebars, and case studies, to better illustrate key points and concepts. The guide intends to be more readable and user-friendly.
In conclusion, the Agile Practice Guide is an essential resource for project leaders and team members who want to adapt to an agile approach in planning and executing projects. It provides practical guidance that is project-focused and covers the most popular agile approaches. It also covers agile-based learning, which is a fertile ground to expand agile practices beyond software development, and the adoption of agile techniques and approaches necessary to manage disruptive technologies. With this guide, project leaders and team members can stay competitive and relevant in today’s environment disrupted by exponential advances in technology and demands from customers for more immediate delivery of value.