PM Insights: Agile Best Practices

Over the next few weeks here on the Project World blog we're going to be featuring some of the insights shared at the 2011 Your Space session at the ProjectWorld® & World Congress for Business Analysts® event.

A repeat favorite, Your Space offers PW&WCBA attendees a chance to debrief on topics covered, come up actionable plans for their return to the office and share in the collective knowledge and expertise of other PW&WCBA attendees and speakers 

This week's topic comes from Table 8: Agile

Given our always popular Agile summit, and this year's presentation on the new PMI-ACP certification, Agile is an important and growing topic for PW&WCBA attendees.  Attendees at this table identified a number of sub-topics within agile that merited further discussion.

These included:
• Earned Value
• Virtual Team
• Risk Management
• Documentation (interpretation that Agile = No Docs)
• Buy-in as a PM practice
• Multiple methods of agile (Kanban, scrum, XP, ect)
• How do you know when you’re done
• Metrics for executives
• No good basis for estimates
• Best practices

When it comes to best practices, the team at table 8 identified some key takeaways for running a successful agile project:

• Have a dedicated team
• Make sure the type of project is the right fit for agile
• Get a solid commitment from leadership
• If you have a virtual team, invest in some onsite meetings
• Do not allow extra discussion during daily stand-ups
  

We'll continue to check back in on the other agile topics identified between now and PW&WCBA 2012. Are there any topics not listed here that you'd like to see covered? What about best practices?

Michelle LeBlanc is a Social Media Strategist at IIR USA and the voice behind the @Project_World twitter. She may be reached at mleblanc@iirusa.com