In response to a comment that I left to a blog post of his in Herding Cats, Glen Alleman said "... phrase Agile Project Management, were so clearly defined". While I'm not an official source of definitions, I would like to take a stab at answering "What is Agile Project Management?". There are really four questions here:

1. What is Agile?
2. What is a Project?
3. What does it mean to manage a project?
4. How does one manage a project in an Agile fashion?

What is Agile?

Agile is a mindset, a philosophy, for software development. The Agile Manifesto lays it out quite clearly. Any software development, product management, project management or other methods that claims to be Agile must embody the mindset laid out in the Agile Manifesto. You really must read the whole manifesto. I won't copy it here, but I will discuss the main ideas. The emphasis in the Agile Manifesto is on satisfying the customer and responding to changing user needs for competitive advantage. Self-organizing teams, ongoing communication and working end products are preferable to formalized, stultifying processes. Supportive environments for sustainable efforts using simplicity, technical excellence and good design allow the sponsors, developers and users to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. Reflection on the process at regular intervals allows for continual and appropriate tuning and adjustments to the agile process.

Most of this isn't strange to project management, though the concept of "self-organizing teams" might seem a bit odd to a traditional, hierarchical organization.

What is a Project?

A project is a temporary, collaborative effort to achieve a specific goal in a set time. At least, this paraphrases the definition I first saw in my first project activities in the Aerospace & Defense industry back in 1979. I've seen definitions that add things like "create a unique product", but the end result can be almost anything: a product, a pyramid, a rocket engine, a scientific advancement, a data warehouse, etc, etc, etc.

The emphasis for a project is that people and other resources come together temporarily to deliver a well-defined result by a specified due date.

What does it mean to manage a project?

Whips often come to mind. That was the main tool to manage the various pyramid building projects. Ok, maybe not.

Project management is the skill of leading people and controlling the expenditure of resources to achieve specified goals on-time and within budget.

There are a variety of schools of thought, methodologies and guides to managing a project. I agree with Glen in that a good starting point is the Project Management Institute (PMI) Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK). I would also add PRINCE2 to that.

I also need to step onto one of my favorite soap boxes for a moment. Project Management does not equal Product Management. Program and Portfolio Management are also unique and separate disciplines. These four professions often get confused. Product Management is a blend of marketing and engineering with the goal of translating user needs into technical specifications that result in marketable goods or services. Program Management specifies, implements and governs large initiatives that impact cross-disciplinary groups within a organization, and changes the process by which an organization conducts its daily affairs; examples are things like a Quality Program or a Decision Support program. Portfolio Management is the art and science of prioritizing and coordinating a set of Projects, often large capital projects, that may or may not overlap in goals, but definitely compete for money, people and resources. Ok, stepping down off the soap box and getting back on point now.

How does one manage a project in an Agile fashion?

Ah, well now. This is the point isn't it? Agile project management requires reconciling the discussion of Agile above with the definition of a Project and Project Management and developing a methodology that uses the Agile mindset of customer satisfaction, responding quickly to changing market needs for competitive advantage with self-organizing teams that reflect upon how they work and change their processes on the fly, while delivering working, valuable, as-specified results in an incremental fashion, on-time and in-budget.

Hmm, that doesn't sound so hard, does it?

Over time, we have evolved our project management methodology for delivering data warehousing, business intelligence and MDM solutions in such a way that, in the words of Todd McGrath of supergloo, inc. have become quite agile, and are now deliberately agile. We've gone from five dimensions of a project to eight over the eight years that IASC has been in existence.

Here's a mindmap that gives you an idea of what we're doing. Though there's a lot more to discuss about this, including the strategic, tactical and implementation tracks, and how iterative waterfall and agile mindset must work together to keep everything and everyone working a sustainable fashion, without burn-out and without missed deadlines, while learning from each iteration, and responding to changing user needs.

Over the seven years that Clarise and I have been running InterActive Systems & Consulting, Inc. we've used our 6D™ methodology to manage InterASC Professional Services project engagements. This methodology came about from Clarise's 20-plus years of working in the software industry, and her training and experience as a project manager for IT implementations at HP, Oracle, CapTech, Williams and KP. And she's a PMI certified PMP. In the 1970's & '80's I worked as a program, project and line manager in Aerospace, switching in the '90's and 00's to working in IT. We brought our expertise together first at Oracle, and over the 14 years since, have been working together on refining our approaches to managing IT projects implemented by and for distributed workgroups. Colleagues pointed out that our 6D™ methodology was becoming more and more Agile in its techniques. Over the past two years, as we've been working more with open source, IT appliance and SaaS companies, we've been experiencing more and more about the community approach to managing distributed workgroups.

Learning from the Beekeeper James Dixon, CTO of Pentaho, Susan Gasson of Drexel University, the Agile Alliance and various scrum practitioners, such as Todd McGrath of supergloo, inc. and our own experiences, we had been selected to speak at the PMI NorCal 2007 Symposium at the end of September. For a variety of reasons, we didn't get to present our mindmap of our current thinking.

We generally start our presentations with the mindmap collapsed so that only the first level of branches show, and then expand along the branches in which the audience seems interested. If they don't tell us what interests them, we ask. That's difficult to do through a blog, so we're just showing the whole thing.

As time permits, we'll be discussing our 7D™ methodology with it's Strategic, Tactical and Scrum tracks in this blog.

Elastic CMS Deployments with Amazon Web Services & Server Virtualization Technology by Reuven Cohen, Chief Technologist, hosted by Derek Anderson, Lead Developer, Enomaly Inc

"Elastic CMS deployment is a model that allows for a operating system to be packaged as a virtual appliance in conjunction to the core content management system components. As system requirements change the CMS can intelligently adapt itself with little or no human involvement.

"Applying the designs of Virtualization, Business Process Execution Language, SOA, Amazon Web services (EC2 & S3) with content management presents an opportunity for a virtual content layer, whereby enterprise content management is defined not as a monolithic repository but rather as a logical library of interchangeable self-describing & self replicating components based on established performance policies.

"This approach allows for content management systems that can be configured to scale across single servers, multiple physical servers, multiple virtualized servers, grids or a combination of all of the above, natively, without modification. The approach allows for even the simplest applications (CMS,CRM,Blog,Forum,etc) to be scaled to millions of users with little or no additional development work. As system requirements grow, so does your content management system, on the fly.

"This presentation will demonstration the elastic capabilities of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon S3, Xen virtualization with open source CMS systems TYPO3, Alfresco and Drupal. Elastic server management will be provided by the Enomalism (LGPL) open source virtual server dashboard."

-- Abstract for Elastic CMS Deployments with Amazon Web Services & Server Virtualization Technology by Reuven Cohen, Chief Technologist, Enomaly Inc

The presentation was done by Derek, who likes to code when the snow gets deep up in Canada, eh.

Elastic computing provides web services via SOAP or other API to allow one to remotely provision and manage one's virtual appliance. [Definition: a virtual appliance is a pre-packaged guest operating system with optimized software to perform a specific function or support a specific process.] Essentially, infrastructure as a service. Virtualization combines the advantages of distributed, small, inexpensive computing with those of large, centralized servers.

Customers like having their own virtual box, and the hoster can be comfortable with the fact that each customer can have exactly the configuration they need, without version/patch conflicts, and if a customer does destroy their "box", all other customers are unaffected.

Virtually also provides some less than obvious advantages such as eliminating hardware incompatibility, having the production box be exactly the same as the development box, scalability and reliability/recovery.

Discussion of hard drive requirements - mainly an infrastructure issue to be considered. RAIS, SAN(?), S3, etc.

Now on reserve battery power; I'll publish now, and maybe update later.

Update...

Enomaly has developed vmcast to distribute VM disk images via RSS2 as an enclosure, much like a podcast can be syndicated. Enomaly's product is open source, so one can imagine many developers making a virtual machine using their own operating system [Linux or openBSD or netBSD or freeBSD or openSolaris or openVMS or, or whatever works best for them] distribution, optimized for their application with a complete stack from VM APIs to OS, database, file system, application and its APIs distributed, perhaps even updated or provisioned, via RSS as simply as getting a podcast today.

Derek gave a brief comparison of EC2 and Enamolism, and Luis Sala of Alfresco, who is an EC2 beta tester and Alfresco is an Enamoly partner, provided a demonstration of EC2.

I decided to relax by reading Shel Israel's latest overview for his publishing project, "Global Neighborhoods". Such globalization is a natural outcome of the TeleInterActive Lifestyle, extending

• business processes through offsourcing,
• corporate presence well beyond the old reach,
• the future of work ,
• flat world software development, and
• personal interactions to an extent only dreamed about by ham radio enthusiasts, pen-pal fans, inveterate world travelers, and people aggregators.

Below is a copy of Shel's post, or at least those paragraphs for which I have a direct comment. [Shel, if you find this beyond the bounds of "fair use" let me know, and I'll remove the copy.] BTW, Shel, have you thought about doing this in a wiki, [e.g. our OSBI Wiki] with only registered users allowed to edit or join the discussion section [to prevent spambots from overrunning the thing]?

I know it's the holiday break, but when you are between time with family and friends, please take a look at tell me what you think. You have already helped me to write a better book and I have not yet gotten to the actual book yet.
-- Shel Israel, Global Neighborhoods Overview v2.0, paragraph 2

The marinara has "drawn up", as my grandmothers would say, and been poured over the meats to simmer in the oven and become the ragu to serve with the ravioli tonight. So, I have some time to think about this.

Title
Global Neighborhoods
--Lowering boundaries to almost everything
-- Shel Israel, Global Neighborhoods Overview v2.0, paragraph 4

The concept of the title, that of neighborhoods, is indeed global in nature. Will it translate well? If so, I think it's a great title. The subtitle, however, doesn't really add anything; it wouldn't give me any extra incentive to buy the book. Perhaps something like "the new common ground for personal and business interaction" might provide more insight into the book.

Overview

Global Neighborhoods examines the impact of social media and low-cost networks to business and culture. It examines the powerful changes that phenomena such as YouTube, MySpace, Bebo, SecondLife, Skype, text and multimedia blogging are having on business, politics and culture. It looks at other society-changing factors.
-- Shel Israel, Global Neighborhoods Overview v2.0, paragraph 5

It seems to me that the Web2.0 focus here might give the book a limited shelf-life, and turn off some publishers and business customers. The phenomena listed, as well as the ability of businesses to outsource everything from call centers to HR overseas, are both evolutionary developments from the economic revolutions brought about by the adoption of the Internet Protocols for communication. Don't get lost in the hype. What we're seeing now is the result of post-bubble settling and growth; of some extremely creative people taking IP communication to the next level.

Central to the book is the argument that the inernet is dramatically lowering the barriers to where people hang out. Geography is becoming much less relevant as people everywhere use the internet to find others who share common interests. We no longer live in just one neighborhood, but in many, based on our mix of interests, whether they be religion, sex, hummingbirds or macramé.
-- Shel Israel, Global Neighborhoods Overview v2.0, paragraph 6

This is true to an extent, and no doubt truer for the younger and more affluent across the world. But there are still many small and medium sized businesses that aren't taking advantage of the these new means of communication and commerce. The fraction of the six-and-a-half billion people in the world who use the Internet on a daily basis is growing, but still small. This is what makes the opportunities so great.

There are pros and cons to this central premise as well. One tenet of the TeleInterActive Lifestyle, is that the ability to work and play anywhere, anytime, not just where you live, has the potential to allow you to become more involved in your "real life" community; more than the typical commuter who treats the home neighborhood as a "bedroom community". However, there is also the potential for a person to become even more isolated from those physically nearby. One might overcome parochialism by joining global neighborhoods. One might ignore local issues to a long term detriment, too.

I've only met you a few times, Shel, but I would guess that you're planning to look at all sides of this. Say so up front. You might also want to say here whether you plan to show these sides as positive and negative, or dispassionately.

From the business perspective, this turns the marketplace upside down. The power is moving from large incumbent organizations into communities where the people who are the most generous have the greatest influence. Companies can try to start their own communities, but unless they open it to competitors, they have little more than factory towns. Likewise, in the global neighborhoods, people making decision based on the advice on trusted friends. Big budget ad and branding campaigns are rendered impotent in these new neighborhoods.
-- Shel Israel, Global Neighborhoods Overview v2.0, paragraph 7

Will you be citing statistics, such as market share lost by companies refusing to join the global conversation? Will you be sharing anecdotes of companies gaining global presence? How about small or family businesses being swamped by global corporations [Starbuck's and other foodie chains vs. the local café and family market]?

I bought a water-saving toilet based on the forums of a plumber in Washington; not global for me, but not someone I would have "met" without the Internet. I also used Consumers' Reports and other sources, but Terry Love's forum is what sold me with "real world" evidence.

I've always thought that advertising was overrated by companies. TiVo like DVRs haven't given us the ability to ignore ads - we've always done that. This technology has given us the ability to control when we pause the show to talk about it [in a chat room or IM or SMS or forum or blog or physically with those around us], or get a sandwich, or visit the head.

Much of Web2.0 is being built on Google's adsense, even though many people have learned to ignore sponsored links of any type. But these two "facts" are contradictory. If large campaigns are indeed rendered impotent, will you be discussing how business can leverage the conversation?

To understand where the marketplace is headed, Global Neighborhoods takes a long, in-depth look at the habits of today’s teens and young adults. It tours some of the Internet places where young people hang out. This is a genration who does not watch television,listen to the radio or read newspapers, yet seem to be amazingly well-informed. Young people are voting in larger numbers than in recent memory and that may explain why a flood of elected officials and political aspirants are leaping into the social media, particularly blogging. They are simply following the voters as they have historically done.
-- Shel Israel, Global Neighborhoods Overview v2.0, paragraph 8

Primarily, a business book, Global Neighborhood focuses at the intersection of technology and culture, showing how people with similar interests all over the world, speaking different languages can find what they share in common and it offers hope for people bypassing their own governments to make peace with each other.
-- Shel Israel, Global Neighborhoods Overview v2.0, paragraph 9

I understand that the youngsters of today are the markets of tomorrow, but paragraph 8, 10 and 11 seem disjointed from 9, almost as though they belong to two different books.

Alongside interviews with executives from numerous companies large and small, Global Neighborhoods examines a private community of Palestinian and Israel teenagers who discover how very much alike they are. It reports on Saudi kids using cell phone messaging to flirt while a stern chaperon looks on in blissful ignorance. It talks with a Scottish teenager who created a Japanese-language parody of the US TV Dating Game and ended up making friends with Japanese kids. It looks at the opportunities in virtual reality, not just for product placements, and virtual news conference, but in its success in engaging autistic students and potential for making history literally come to life.
-- Shel Israel, Global Neighborhoods Overview v2.0, paragraph 10

The book will look at some of the threats and dangers found for young people in social media, but it will dwell more on the hope for an emerging global society that is able to bypass marketing messages to learn the truth about products and services and perhaps--just perhaps, bypass governments to make peace with each other.
-- Shel Israel, Global Neighborhoods Overview v2.0, paragraph 11

By reading Global Neighborhoods, readers will understand how they need to recalibrate their existing businesses over the short-term future, why they have never had a better opportunity to start a successful global business from the comfort of their own homes. They will have a much clearer sense of the neighborhoods in which their children dwell and how those neighborhoods may contain some dangers, they overall pose greater hope and opportunity than perhaps any generation that has preceded it.
-- Shel Israel, Global Neighborhoods Overview v2.0, paragraph 12

Target Audience

This book fits into three market categories: Business, General Interest and Current Affairs very much like recent best-sellers such as The World is Flat, The Wisdom of Crowds, Freakonomics and Blink.
-- Shel Israel, Global Neighborhoods Overview v2.0, paragraph 13

Anyone in an established business trying to recalibrate strategy to survive fundamental marketplace changes will be interested in this book as well as business investors and entrepreneurs. Likewise parents, curious to see what their child’s world is likely to be like, will find this book valuable. Readers concerned with the impact of technology on world cultures will find this book useful and finally, people hoping the world might improve on any level if people can bypass large organizations and deal directly with each other will also find this book useful.
-- Shel Israel, Global Neighborhoods Overview v2.0, paragraph 14

Paragraphs 12, 13 and 14 talk about a target audience that is itself global: investors, entrepreneurs, executives, parents, teachers, revolutionaries, and anyone interested in current affairs and world cultural.

Will the book be primarily looking towards the future, or explaining what's happening now? Is this primarily a business book, or is your passion leading you elsewhere, Shel?

Will the impact of Nick Negroponte's One Laptop per Child, a.k.a the XO, or Intel's Classmate PC, and other philanthropic efforts to bridge the digital divide, accelerate the growth of global communities? Are not just markets, but the the global superpowers about to be turned upside down; will India and China replace the U.S.A and EU? Will peace on earth and goodwill to all truly come about from these global neighborhoods, or a Matrix like isolation from the physical world?

The overview, as it now stands, looks like a prelude to a very interesting book to come. I think though, that as a sales tool for a publisher, some narrowing of topics and target may be needed.

I went through this exercise today to see if I still had things to say on the TeleInterActive Lifestyle. I haven't been blogging much here. But I see that I still have some strong feelings about this aspect of our social evolution. I hope that I didn't come across as too critical. I think that Shel's "Global Neighborhoods" will be a great effort, resulting in as fine a read as "Naked Conversations".

Recently, my friend Todd McGrath has written about the symbiotic relationship of open source software and offshore development. He builds a case for the relationship between building trust in developers you might never meet (or mitigating risk in an offsourced project) with the use of open source software in the project.

In combining Open Source software and offshore development, high quality, cost effective software is more easily obtainable... Open Source provides a foundation of trust and confidence when using and/or providing offshore software development services.

In this article, my definition of Open Source is intended to mean complete products, tools, libraries, etc. with a vibrant community.

When implementing an outsource development strategy, choose developers that will use Open Source software in the overall solution. Using Open Source in the solution provides a shorter path to confidence and trust in outsourced software developers. Put another way, open source plays a positive part in the risk management of the decision to outsource. By choosing offshore software development partners that deliver based on community established Open Source with appropriate license for your needs, quality and the most competitive cost can be obtained.
-- Todd McGrath in Flat World Software Development » Open Source and Offshore Development

Those excerpts give his premise and conclusion, but you must read the whole article to see how he builds his case.

Todd focuses on outsourced, especially offshore, software development. There are, however, other things being offshored by businesses today. Business processes such as accounting and human resources, IT operations & maintenance, telecommunications management, design and development projects, and manufacturing are only a few examples. And there are many reasons for businesses to outsource. Some of these are reducing cost, enhancing skills, suplementing personnel, and taking advantage of economies of scale.

Having a common architecture or framework can be important in mitigating risk. But the assumption here is that if the first outsourced project fails, another team can pick it up because open source software provides common themes throughout software development, and you can find other developers with familiarity with the open source software that forms the basis of the project. I don't believe that this constitutes bulding trust in the original team, or even in the offsourcing tactic. So, I disagree with the premise that bulding trust is equivalent to mitigating risk. I would agree that using open source software in a software development project can help mitigate risk.

More importantly to building trust and to mitigating risk is assuring that the culture of the outsourcing partner matches your own culture. Can both partners truly communicate? Not just speak the same language, or a dialect of the same language, but truly understand each other's written and spoken dialogues, specifications, emails, messages and meeting notes. When offsourcing, societal, cultural and language barriers will complicate matters, and you may not have much control over these factors. [Excepting some artificial and unsustainable rules, such as a USA firm should only choose offsourcing partners in the Philippines because of the good blend of cultural match and economics.] You do have control over corporate culture aspects that affect the project, process, program or people being outsourced. For the type of software development projects of which Todd is speaking, you might want to consider:

• decision making
• documentation
• specification
• in-code comments
• project management
• QA
• configuration control
• version & release management
• testing
• bug fixes, enhancements and problem escalation/resolution
• meeting protocol
• team structure/team building
• interfaces across and interactions among business untis/users, operations personnel and developers

I think these types of factors will be more important in building trust across distributed workgroups than the software architecture to be used.

Having said that, I do agree that there is a symbiotic relationship between offsourcing and open source development methodologies, in that both use the priciples of distributed workgroups, both are enhanced by the TeleInterActive Lifestyle™ and the two movements have feed off each other to a certain extent.