Project Management

All Project Management Downloads

Project Management White Papers

• Mastering the Iteration: An Agile White Paper

  Dean Leffingwell

  By: Dean Leffingwell

  The heartbeat of Agile development is the iteration – the ability of the team to create working, tested, value-delivered code in a short time box – with the goal of producing an increment of potentially shippable code at the end of each iteration. In this white paper, Dean describes the basic iteration pattern and the activities that a team engages in to meet this key challenge.

• A CIO's Playbook for Adopting the Scrum Method of Achieving Software Agility

  Dean Leffingwell

  Hubert Smits

  By: Dean Leffingwell & Hubert Smits

  The authors of this white paper have helped many hundreds of teams adopt Scrum. Here they share how CIOs can implement Scrum on an organization-wide basis - the challenges they will face as well as the rewards - and provides a playbook for adopting Scrum in enterprises where software, and lots of it, is the key to competitive success in the marketplace.

• Rally's Team Agility Assessment

  Ryan Martens

  By: Ryan Martens

  The goal of this assessment is to get an accurate picture of where your team is in terms of Agile adoption. As you proceed through the assessment, your total values for each area will be automatically calculated, updating the radar chart.

• A Project Manager's Survival Guide to Going Agile

  Michele Sliger

  By: Michele Sliger

  This paper focuses on re-defining the job of project manager to better fit the self-managed team environment, one of the core Agile principles. Special emphasis is placed on the shift to servant leadership, with its focus on facilitation and collaboration.

• Leaning IT: Applying the Principle of Pull to Scale Agile Teams

  Ryan Martens

  Jean Tabaka

  By: Ryan Martens & Jean Tabaka

  Reaping the benefits of Agile software development beyond the team level is an enticing proposition. In fact, in today’s competitive climate and brutal economy, perhaps it is even more than that — it is a necessity. Based on documented successes, organizations are recognizing the business imperative to “go big” with Agile and as a result, they are confronting the confusion and churn of when and how to scale their Agile adoption.

• Five Levels of Agile Planning: From Enterprise Product Vision to Team Stand-up

  Hubert Smits

  By: Hubert Smits

  Existing Agile methods often focus on small, single-team projects and overlook the broader impact of large, multi-team and multi-year projects. This paper outlines a distinct planning framework that has been used successfully in large-scale Agile projects and relies on five levels: product vision, product roadmap, release plan, sprint plan and daily commitment.

• Tactical Management of Agile Development: Achieving Competitive Advantage

  Dean Leffingwell

  By: Dean Leffingwell

  This white paper provides an invaluable Agile development overview full of techniques, best practices and educational materials.

• The Top 3 Cost-Cutting Mistakes CIOs Make - And How to Avoid Them

  The current economic downturn has resulted in contraction of IT Department budgets and a mandate to allocate resources only to the most critical projects and execute flawlessly. This white paper describes typical reactions to falling budgets and common problems they cause. It then recommends an alternative for achieving cost-savings and improved prioritization using a more Agile framework for effective portfolio management.

Back to Top

Project Management Presentations

• Scaling Agile Successfully_Slides

  Scaling Agile Successfully

• Scaling Agile in 7 Smooth Steps

  Prepare for a successful Agile rollout by learning the seven steps that will help you smoothly scale Agile across your enterprise. Join speaker Alan Atlas, Certified Scrum Trainer and Coach and Agile Coach, as he goes through the steps and shares tips and tactics gleaned from his extensive experience helping companies like Amazon scale Agile across multiple teams.

• Tooling in an Agile Environment and the Acorn Case Study

  Torsten Weirich

  Ryan Martens

  By: Torsten Weirich & Ryan Martens

  To explore the role of tools as a change-enabler in adopting Agile, this presentation introduces an organizational change model from waterfall to Agile. Using this model, Ryan and Torsten will show how changes in the “dev-build-test-fix” cycle along with project/program visibility, tracking and signaling tools can help lead the change effort, especially in medium to large teams.

• Five Levels of Agile Planning

  Hubert Smits

  Zach Nies

  By: Hubert Smits & Zach Nies

  This slide presentation guides participants through Agile practices when applied to large-scale projects, which can broadly be defined as projects that involve over 50 people and take months or years to complete. Hubert and Zach will walk through the five levels of Agile planning – from yearly planning conducted by the product owner to the daily stand-up meetings of the delivery team.

• Intro to Scrum

  Hubert Smits

  By: Hubert Smits

  In this slide presentation, Hubert Smits will introduce the audience to Scrum, one of the most popular Agile methods. He will explain the process details of this project management method, the place of Scrum in the Agile world and talk about the roles within Scrum. Throughout the presentation, he will share his experience as an international Scrum coach with the audience.

• I Don't Like Mondays

  Jean Tabaka

  By: Jean Tabaka

  In this slide presentation, author, Agile coach and Certified ScrumMaster Trainer Jean Tabaka shows that with the right culture and good meeting management, teams won't dread Mondays anymore.

• From Analyst to Owner

  Ronica Roth

  By: Ronica Roth

  For many business analysts (BAs), Agile provides a perfect, and ultimately more rewarding, role – product owner. Many BAs will need to rethink their role and their talents to succeed as product owner. In some organizations, BAs support the product owner rather than holding that position themselves. In this slide presentation heavy on exercises and discussion, we will explore how BAs fit on an Agile team.

• Agile Enterprise Rollout: The Greening of the Software Industry

  Ryan Martens

  Jean Tabaka

  By: Ryan Martens & Jean Tabaka

  To stem this model of waste and poison for a more sustainable 21st century model, the software industry has an opportunity to lead in the greening of the high technology industry. This translates to the following three software-based trends of a zero-waste model: deliver Software as a Service (SaaS), apply Agile software development for sustainable flow of value and rely on social networks for product uptake.

• Overview of Agile

  Hubert Smits

  By: Hubert Smits

  This slide presentation provides a broad introduction to concepts of Agile software development and Agile methods. The talk is based on the speaker’s experience as an Agile coach and Certified Scrum Master. Traditional concepts from waterfall or plan-driven development are transformed to an Agile perspective. Examples are release and iteration planning, progress reporting, meeting formats and scaling projects from 10 people teams to 300 people teams.

• Agile Waterfall Cooperative

  Michele Sliger

  By: Michele Sliger

  In this slide presentation, readers will learn to factor their company's business needs into their existing Agile procedures, and management will learn how to begin the investigative work of determining how to streamline these requirements and activities so that they don't hamper the project.

• Successfully Managing Agile Projects in the Waterfall Enterprise

  Michele Sliger

  By: Michele Sliger

  In this presentation, Michele Sliger outlines how to factor your company's business needs into existing Agile processes, streamline requirements and activities and identify specific points where Agile and waterfall teams must plan, coordinate, and review progress.

• A Tale of Two Writing Teams

  Stacia Broderick

  By: Stacia Broderick

  Sometimes considered an "afterthought" in the product development lifecycle, technical writers often struggle to become part of a performing Agile team and can become lost when trying to transition from waterfall to Agile. This presentation provides insight and experience related to technical writers' transition to and scaling with Agile teams.

• DSDM - Go for the Nine

  Jean Tabaka

  By: Jean Tabaka

  In this presentation, Jean Tabaka reviews the similarities and differences of DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development Method) and Agile. The presentation explores DSDM history, phases, practices, and benefits.

• Distributed Agile Experience Report

  Hubert Smits

  By: Hubert Smits

  The BMC Identity Management organization is based in Israel, and has offices in France, the USA and India. Over the past years, the organization has grown through organic growth and acquisitions into a successful business unit within the global BMC organization. Five hundred people are successfully using Scrum to deliver monthly product increments, and the success of this implementation combined with the uncertainty of the product requirements formed the basis for the decision to use Scrum in this project.

• Agile Champion Toolkit - Learn How to Lower Your IT Costs

  Good teams develop. Great teams ship - on time. This presentation describes why Agile teams are 37% faster to market and more able to accurately predict their release dates.

• Chalk Talk: Lean and Agile

  Jean Tabaka

  By: Jean Tabaka

  Compare and contrast Lean and Agile principles, practices and terms.

• Get into Flow with User Stories

  Ken Clyne

  By: Ken Clyne

  This slide deck accompanies Ken Clyne's educational webinar on User Stories.

• Chalk Talk: Sizing and Estimating

  Jean Tabaka

  By: Jean Tabaka

  Learn how sizing and estimating provide insights for backlog prioritization and continuous improvement. Discover how to shift priorities to plan and project what your team can complete in the future.

Back to Top

Project Management Webinars

Archived Webinars

• Planning and Maintaining the Rhythm of Distributed Scrum

  Hubert Smits

  By: Hubert Smits

  This webinar is the tale of a distributed Scrum project with 50 people in four continents. BMC Identity Management decided to build their next generation product, including architectural changes and component integration, using Scrum to handle the uncertainty of their product's requirements.

• Agile Styles: Lean and DSDM

  Mary Poppendieck

  Jean Tabaka

  By: Mary Poppendieck & Jean Tabaka

  In this webinar, Mary Poppendieck and Jean Tabaka, both veterans of Agile coaching and training, explain the basics, respectively, of Lean and DSDM methodologies. This InfoQ video, Agile Styles: Lean and DSDM, presents two important alternatives to the more widespread Scrum and XP methodologies.

• How to Plan Agile Projects with Distributed Teams

  Hubert Smits

  By: Hubert Smits

  Originally presented at Google Tech Talks, this video gives a hands-on overview of the activities involved in larger Agile projects that stretch out over more then a few months and have more then a single team involved. Hubert based the talk on his paper "Multi-Level Planning for Agile Projects" and presents a practical implementation of the planning levels.

• Avoiding the Four Roadblocks to Agile Adoption

  Dean Leffingwell

  By: Dean Leffingwell

  This webinar describes the top four roadblocks teams often face when implementing Agile development and project management practices.

• Do You Recognize These 12 Warning Signs Your Agile Adoption is Failing?

  Jean Tabaka

  By: Jean Tabaka

  In this webinar, Jean Tabaka will present her top 12 warning signs that your Agile adoption may be on a path to failure. She will warn you about lack of retrospectives, failure to invest in the infrastructure needed to support continuous flow of value and other painfully familiar scenarios. She will then challenge you to refocus, teaching you tips about how to get back on a steady path to Agile success.

• Scaling Agility with Lean

  Ryan Martens

  By: Ryan Martens & Dave West

  In this webinar, join Forrester Senior Analyst Dave West, and Rally founder and CTO Ryan Martens, as they share proof points and real-world examples of how to scale Agile adoption with Lean Thinking.

• Successful Agile Planning: An Iteration How-to

  Ken Clyne

  By: Ken Clyne

  Presented by Agile Coach Ken Clyne, this 1 hour webinar will help you leave expensive, traditional software development practices far behind and get on the right track with planning, executing, inspecting and adapting your Agile iterations. You will walk away with: proven techniques for leading a team, or teams, through an effective iteration planning meeting, hands-on exercises for building product vision and backlog, and answers to the most common stumbling blocks for new Agile teams, including writing user stories and estimating.

• The Rally Rev-up: Agile and Rally in 0-60

  This introductory webinar is ideal for software project, development and quality teams who want to see how Agile practices and Rally help you: Speed and better predict time to market; Gain visibility into priorities, roadblocks and status; and improve team cohesion, productivity and morale

• Getting Started with Agile and Rally Webinar

  This one-hour webinar describes and demonstrates Rally's leading solutions for managing all aspects of Agile software development.

• Webinar: Proving the Financial Impact of Agile

  Join Rally Software for the first in this two-part webinar series on the proven ROI of Agile practices in these turbulent economic times. Learn how to quantify the benefits of Agile practices including faster time to market, increased productivity and higher quality. Find out where to expect significant cost savings and revenue increases, and get a toolkit for making the economic case for Agile adoption. If you’re worried about your company’s viability, your team’s success or your own job security, you won’t want to miss this webinar series.

• Making Agile Work for Your Bottom Line

  Ryan Martens

  By: Ryan Martens

  Join Rally Software for the second session in this two-part webinar series on the proven ROI of Agile practices in these turbulent economic times. Learn how to quantify the benefits of Agile practices including faster time to market, increased productivity and higher quality. Find out where to expect significant cost savings and revenue increases, and get a toolkit for making the economic case for Agile adoption. If you’re worried about your company’s viability, your team’s success or your own job security, you won’t want to miss this webinar series.

Back to Top

Project Management Articles

• Bridging the Gap: Agile Projects in the Waterfall Enterprise

  Michele Sliger

  By: Michele Sliger

  The economy’s downturn and subsequent budget cuts have led to greater interest in how to do things faster and how to do more with less. As a result, Agile methodologies have attracted many CIOs who are looking for approaches to make product development faster, more reliable, and more satisfying to the end-user.

• Scaling Agile Processes: Five Levels of Planning

  Hubert Smits

  By: Hubert Smits

  This framework relies on five levels to address the fundamental planning principles of priorities, estimates, and commitments. The five levels can be defined as: product vision, product roadmap, release plan, sprint plan, and daily commitment.

• Agile Tooling: A Point/Counterpoint Discussion

  Ryan Martens

  By: Ryan Martens & Ron Jeffries

  It has been six years since the authoring of the Agile Manifesto, and the technology and tooling landscape has changed since then. This conversation between Ron Jeffries and Ryan Martens debates the merits and weaknesses of tooling Agile.

• The Greening of the Software Industry

  Ryan Martens

  By: Ryan Martens

  In this article, Ryan outlines three innovations that can drive the software industry to a sustainable model of green business and a stronger bottom line. These innovations are: shifting value delivery from product to service, participating in a closed-loop flow of materials where waste is an input, and enhancing resource efficiency by a factor of four.

• In Search of Commitment Clarity

  Michele Sliger

  By: Michele Sliger

  When planning your workload, it's easy to bite off more than you can chew. But as Michele Sliger explains in this tale of one overachiever's attempt to take on too much work, overcommitting yourself means overcommitting your team.

• Case Study: How BMC is Scaling Agile Development

  Ryan Martens

  Israel Gat

  By: Ryan Martens & Israel Gat

  Sure, Agile development works well for small teams. But what happens when you apply Agile practices to a program that involves 300-plus developers and testers spread from India to Houston to Israel?

• Relating PMBOK Practices to Agile Practices

  Michele Sliger

  By: Michele Sliger

  Professionals at the Project Management Institute (PMI) state that the PMBOK is a guide to best practices and that organizations must use their own discretion when implementing the practices. But Michele has found that many of the PMBOK practices can be followed (albeit it sometimes quite differently) in other methodology models, including those of the Agile family.

• The Best-Laid Plans...

  Stacia Broderick

  By: Stacia Broderick

  It's a fact of life that plans change, but the proper implementation of Agile and release planning can get you back on track. Just be sure to keep the communication lines open and clear throughout the process.

• Ready for Agile: An Intro to Agile Principles

  Ryan Martens

  By: Ryan Martens

  Agile is an organizational change tool that can lead to positive changes in your projects and programs. It is a very simple and different strategy for project management than critical path and waterfall. This introduction to Agile is written for traditionally trained project managers who understand and practice critical-path planning and stage-gate program management.

• Daily Standup Withdrawal in Scrum Teams

  Stacia Broderick

  By: Stacia Broderick

  There’s a terrible affliction that seems to be going around many Scrum teams. Its symptoms are easy to recognize: glassy eyes, pale skin, robotic answers, and narcoleptic episodes during and immediately following daily standup meetings. The good news is, this syndrome can (and should) be prevented.

• Case Study: Shopzilla Scales Software Agility with Agile Tools

  Ryan Martens

  By: Ryan Martens & Christophe Louvion

  Shopzilla successfully implemented Agile during a six-month period where it doubled its engineering team. While most development teams would have been happy only to have increased its release cycle time by 50%, Shopzilla also increased productivity by 20% and sped new employee ramp time.

• Seven Agile Practices That Scale

  Dean Leffingwell

  By: Dean Leffingwell

  The benefits of Agile software methods, including faster time to market, better responsiveness to changing customer requirements and higher application quality are undeniable to those who have mastered these practices. In this article, Dean observes seven principles common to all Agile methods that can be readily applied throughout the enterprise.

• Retrospectives: A Case Study on Techniques for Incremental Improvement

  Hubert Smits

  By: Hubert Smits & Tamara Sulaiman

  In this article, Hubert and Tamara describe their work with teams that were spread between the US and India, and with the unavoidable cultural differences.

• Getting New Agile Teams into Flow

  Jean Tabaka

  By: Jean Tabaka

  Jean Tabaka considers "flow," a term borrowed from the Lean thinking world, to be a core discipline for guiding new Agile teams. In this column, Jean reveals the characteristics of Agile teams in flow, the roadblocks they may have to overcome, and the benefits they will derive from their successful flow adoption.

• The Agile Impact Report: Proven Performance Metrics from the Agile Enterprise

  In this report, third-party research firm QSM Associates assesses the performance of 29 Agile development projects against a database of 7,500 primarily traditional development projects in three key areas: productivity, time-to-market and quality. The results were that teams using Agile and Rally were 50% faster to market and 25% more productive with one quarter the number of defects.

Back to Top

Project Management Reports

• Forrester Just Made Your Agile Tool Decision Easier

  In Forrester’s evaluation of Agile development management (ADM) tool vendors, Rally Software is a category Leader. Forrester states, "[Rally] offers the best current balance of product capability and strategic outlook." See how Forrester rates Rally and 9 other Agile ALM vendors as well as how mainstream Agile adoption is changing the way businesses operate.

Back to Top