Solution Focused Agility in Projects and Management

[Hans-Peter Korn]

This in first instance is a place to collect interesting documents about "Agility" and how it fits to SF and how Agility and SF may profit from each other.
For discussions about this topic I prefer to do it in the SOLUTION-List: For me it is much comfortabler to write mails with a mail client compared with the restricted textbox-size in "ning"
AND:
with the list much more persons can follow the discussion in a well known and very simple way directly and not with alerts only....

[Hans-Peter Korn]

This "Reader" is a read only version, because it contains a lot of pages out of the book of Alistair Cockburn: Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game (2nd Edition). If you want to have this on paper: Please order the book! I can highliy recommend it!

[Hans-Peter Korn]

This "Introduction to Agile Methodologies" is a nice slideshow (as a pdf) created by Siddharta Govindaraj from Silver Stripe Software Pvt Ltd.

[Hans-Peter Korn]

This "Agile Overview" gives a deeper insight in some aspects of agility - focused on SW-developmant.

[Hans-Peter Korn]

This slideshow (as a pdf) "Social Project Management" focuses especially on the social system of humans interacting and co-creating result in a project.
They call it "Project Management 2.0" following a recent trend to label (derived from Web 2.0) many things with a "2.0"-postfix, for example: "Management 2.0"...

[Hans-Peter Korn]

Here a list of JOURNAL ARTICLES, BOOK CHAPTERS & PROCEEDINGS PAPERS about AGILIY in HRM written by Prof. Lee Dyer

[Hans-Peter Korn]

Here soming about Agility written in GERMAN - a quite good summary!!!

[Hans-Peter Korn]

Bart van Loon provided in the Building Connections - Discussion a ==> literature list that is in part dutch, but mostly international.
And he also references to this ==> reference list from Prof. Lee Dyer

[Bart van Loon]

Cockburn has an excellent site with loads of material on the subject. Here's one of his talks....

[Hans-Peter Korn]

Yes - of course! Thank's for mentioning it!
Here is the URL of his site:
http://alistair.cockburn.us/index.php/Main_Page

An in addition to it other interesting sites:

http://pmdoi.org with six very simple (but not easy...) statements about "Agility in Projectmanagement" which for me fits very good to the Solution Focused - thinking, called "Declaration of Interdependence"

In this website there is also a link to http://apln.org/ and http://www.agilealliance.org/ which are worth to open...

And maybe you can have a look at http://www.agilemanifesto.org/ and http://www.agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

[Hans-Peter Korn]

This here (attched) is a good summary of "SCRUM" (extract from an ==> article in wikipedia, or in ==> German here)

SCRUM is a process skeleton for adaptive project management that includes a set of practices and predefined roles.

Following are some general practices of Scrum:

• Customers become a part of the development team. (i.e. the customer must be genuinely interested in the output.)
• Like all other forms of agile software processes, Scrum has frequent intermediate deliveries with working functionality. This enables the customer to get working software earlier and enables the project to change its requirements according to changing needs.
• Frequent risk and mitigation plans developed by the development team itself. – Risk Mitigation, Monitoring and Management (risk analysis) at every stage and with genuinity.
• Transparency in planning and module development – Let everyone know who is accountable for what and by when.
• Frequent stakeholder meetings to monitor progress – Balanced (Delivery, Customer, Employee, Process) Dashboard updates – Stakeholders' update – You have to have Advance Warning Mechanism, i.e. visibility to potential slippage / deviation ahead of time.
• No problems are swept under the carpet. No one is penalized for recognizing or describing any unforeseen problem.
• Workplaces and working hours must be energized. – "Working more hours" does not necessarily mean "producing more output."

[Hans-Peter Korn]

an input from Liselotte Baeijaert:

I just read a nice acronym for "agile" on the training-ideas yahoo group. I thought it might interest you!
It's a posting from Vic Williams:

For /me/ a process or project is "Agile" if it exhibits a certain set of what I consider to be "key characteristics" of Agility:

* (A)DAPTIVE: adapting/responding to change rather than predictive/plan-driven

* (G)OAL-VALUE-DRIVEN: focus is on tangible working end-results that
deliver operational value for the business

* (I)TERATIVE/INCREMENTAL: work in short feedback & learning loops at multiple levels of scale (e.g., task/implementation, team/integration, iteration, and release)

* (L)EAN: minimizes waste & intermediate artifacts to increase
throughput and smooth-out flow

* (E)MERGENT behavior: self-organization/regulation emerges out of
simple rules and guidelines for intense collaboration/interaction and
continual reflective improvement (this applies both to [emergent]
designs and the teams that create them)

Modified a bit from what Brad Appleton just emailed at
[e-mail]
B.t.w. If you google brad appleton, you find much more about the subject!

[Josef Scherer]

There is a lot of interesting material on Scrum on Mike Cohn's webpage:
http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/scrum