Managing Agile Delivery

Agile is rapidly becoming the default approach for software delivery. Based on small, cross-functional teams, agile provides a transparent and powerful way of delivering technical products and services, and increasingly many non-technical products. Even so, the ability to govern the work of agile teams remains challenging. Applying traditional project management approaches based on tracking a sequence of related activities or tasks against a master project plan, conflicts with the core premise that agile teams are cross-functional and self-organizing.

In this course we look at how to track the progress and performance of agile teams – how to plan long-term, and track progress towards the end goal. We look at how agile teams address risk, whether technical risk or other forms of project risk. We consider how agile projects can be governed successfully and safely in different contexts, such as highly-regulated environments or working with complex products or legacy systems. Finally, we discuss governance structures, traditionally owned by a project or program management office (the PMO), that work in an agile environment without slowing down or compromising the benefits of agile delivery.