Project managers who are new to agile methods often have questions about how to track progress on agile projects. Some of the traditional measures don’t line up very naturally with agile thinking and agile practices, especially measures that are concerned with tracking team members’ time and comparing estimated and actual task durations. One of the main issues is understanding how to project realistic delivery dates with methods that don’t lend themselves to the Gantt approach.

You’re negotiating a project with a client or internal customer, but they balk when you don’t present a fixed budget and a predefined list of requirements. How do you convince them that the benefits of an Agile team outweigh a top heavy and fragile requirements document? Based on Agile experience with government and commercial clients, we will discuss ways to make your customer feel comfortable with process changes that don’t always result in the same set of documents they are used to.

Using Google Docs you can create your own lightweight project management tools and through simple and powerful visual management provide the people involved with shared information that will give transparency into progress and problems

Compared to most commercial project management tools using Google Docs is very flexible. That way the tools can be adapted to how the processes of the project continuously improve. And not the other way around.

The demonstration is based on more than 2 years of experience using Google Docs for Agile processes in a distributed development context.

Are you thinking about trying agile approaches? Do you have an agile transition underway? Is your team or organization trying to become agile, but been less than successful thus far? A foundational implication – and the biggest potential roadblock – of the agile manifesto is culture change.

Therefore, to be successful with agile approaches and especially to scale them, you must go beyond agile technical practices and simultaneously tackle culture changes. This session shows why this is so, introduces a simple culture model, and gives you an opportunity to try out a culture tool.

Agile Project Management (APM) addresses the challenges of embracing change, encouraging innovation, and delivering continuous customer value through a set of agile principles and practices.

The session will present the conceptual framework of agile methods, how agile processes are Envision-Evolve rather than Plan-Do, stories from agile projects both small and large (600 people) and from different domains such as software and medical instruments, and how the “flow” of an agile project differs from more traditionally managed projects.