Jim Highsmith Quotes & Sayings

There are three particularly important issues involved in delivering customer value: focusing on innovation rather than efficiency and optimization, concentrating on execution, and lean thinking. — Jim Highsmith

In fact, in an agile project, technical excellence is measured by both capacity to deliver customer value today and create an adaptable product for tomorrow. — Jim Highsmith

If your goal is to deliver a product that meets a known and unchanging specification, then try a repeatable process. However, if your goal is to deliver a valuable product to a customer within some targeted boundaries, when change and deadlines are significant factors, then reliable Agile processes work better. — Jim Highsmith

When project leaders focus on delivery, they add value to projects. When they focus on planning and control, they tend to add overhead. — Jim Highsmith

Agile Project Management -like its lean development counterparts- streamlines the development process, concentrating on value-adding activities and eliminating overhead and compliance activities. — Jim Highsmith

Peel back the facade of rigorous methodology projects and ask why the project was successful, and the answer is people. — Jim Highsmith

rinciples, or "rules" in complexity theory terminology, affect how tools and practices are implemented. Practices are how principles are acted out. Grand principles that generate no action are mere vapor. Conversely, specific practices in the absence of guiding principles are often inappropriately used. Although the use of agile practices may vary from team to team, the principles are constant. Principles are the simple rules of complex human adaptive systems. — Jim Highsmith

If we want to build great products, we need great people. If we want to attract and keep great people, we need great principles — Jim Highsmith

The best way to get a project done faster is to start sooner — Jim Highsmith

The agile value "Delivering Value over Meeting Constraints" provides a focus for rethinking how we measure performance on projects. — Jim Highsmith

In a self-organized team, individuals take accountability for managing their own workload, shift work among themselves based on need and best fit, and take responsibility for team effectiveness. Team members have considerable leeway in how they deliver results, they are self-disciplined in their accountability for those results, and they work within a flexible framework. — Jim Highsmith

What is the difference between project management and project leadership? Although there is an elusive line between them, the core difference is that management deals with complexity, whereas leadership deals with change. — Jim Highsmith

In my early years of iterative development, I thought timeboxes were actually about time. What I came to realize is that timeboxes are actually about forcing tough decisions. — Jim Highsmith

Authoritarian managers use power, often in the form of fear, to get people to do something their way. Leaders depend for the most part on influence rather than power, and influence derives from respect rather than fear. Respect, in turn, is based on qualities such as integrity, ability, fairness, truthfulness - in short, on character. Leaders are part of the team, and although they are given organizational authority, their real authority isn't delegated top-down but earned bottom-up. From the outside, a managed team and a led team can look the same, but from the inside they feel very different. — Jim Highsmith

Creating new products and services differs from making minor enhancements to existing ones. The first must focus on innovation and adaptability, whereas the second usually focuses on efficiency and optimization. Efficiency delivers products and services that we can think of. Innovation delivers products that we can barely imagine. Efficiency and optimization are appropriate drivers for a production project, whereas innovation and creativity should drive an exploration-type project. A production mindset can restrict our vision to what appears doable. An exploration mindset helps us explore what seems impossible. — Jim Highsmith

Dialogue, discussion, and participatory decision making are all part of building self-discipline. — Jim Highsmith

In an agile project the team takes care of the tasks and the project leader takes care of the team. — Jim Highsmith

A traditional project manager focuses on following the plan with minimal changes, whereas an agile leader focuses on adapting successfully to inevitable changes. — Jim Highsmith

The Agile Project Management principles and framework encourage learning and adapting as an integral part of delivering value to customers. — Jim Highsmith

If you find that your organization can't make the hard decisions that Scrum demands, then high-risk, uncertain projects have very little probability of success in your organization. — Jim Highsmith

Traditional waterfall methods deliver value at the end of the project, often months or years after the project begins. Agile projects can deliver value quickly and incrementally during the life of the project. Capturing value early and often can significantly improve a project's return on investment, and utilizing iterative, feature-based delivery is the cornerstone practice in making that happen. — Jim Highsmith

Outcomes indicators include product vision, business objectives, and capabilities (high-level product functionality), not detail requirements. These outcome characteristics define a releasable product and quality objectives define a reliable and adaptable (works today, easy to enhance) product. These are the critical value traits, then teams need to strive to meet constraints - scope, schedule, and cost - but as secondary in importance to the value components. In many, if not most, agile projects schedule becomes the most critical constraint and is timeboxed (fixed) and scope varies. — Jim Highsmith

The tail is the time period from "code slush" (true code freezes are rare) or "feature freeze" to actual deployment. This is the time period when companies do some or all of the following: beta testing, regression testing, product integration, integration testing, documentation, defect fixing. The worst "tail" I've encountered was 18 months - 18 months from feature freeze to product release, and most of that time was spent in QA. I've — Jim Highsmith

Creating change requires innovation: developing new products, creating new sales channels, reducing product development time, customizing products for increasingly smaller market segments. In addition, your company must be able to respond quickly to both anticipated and unanticipated changes created by your competitors and customers. — Jim Highsmith

Innovative ideas aren't generated in structured, authoritarian environments but in an adaptive culture based on the principles of self-organization and self-discipline. — Jim Highsmith

Agility is principally about mindset, not practices. — Jim Highsmith

At the core of healthy team relationships is trust and respect. — Jim Highsmith

The essence of Agile movement, whether in new product development, new service offerings, software applications, or project management, rests on two foundational goals: delivering valuable products to customers and creating working environments in which people look forward to coming to work each day. — Jim Highsmith

Agile Project Management is an execution-biased model, not a planning-and-control-biased model. — Jim Highsmith

Agility is the ability to adapt and respond to change ... agile organizations view change as an opportunity, not a threat. — Jim Highsmith

Agile Project Management focuses on selecting the right skills for project team members and molding them into productive teams. — Jim Highsmith

People don't change that much. Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That is hard enough (Buckingham and Coffman 1999). — Jim Highsmith

Iterative development, when accompanied with reasonable end-of-iteration reviews - product, technical, process, team - is also self-correcting. — Jim Highsmith

Self-organizing teams form the core of APM. They blend freedom and responsibility, flexibility and structure. In the face of inconsistency and ambiguity, the teams strive to consistently deliver on the product vision within the project constraints. Accomplishing this requires teams with a self-organizing structure and self-disciplined individual team members. Building this kind of team is the core of an agile project leader's job. — Jim Highsmith

The feature delivery approach helps define a workable interface between customers and product developers. — Jim Highsmith

Self-discipline is also built on competence, persistence, and the willingness to assume accountability for results. Competence is more than skill and ability; it's attitude and experience. — Jim Highsmith

The iterative piece of agile can be defined by four key terms: iterative, feature-based, timeboxed, and incremental. — Jim Highsmith

Process is not a substitute for skill. — Jim Highsmith

If you have unskilled people who work poorly together, no amount of process will save your projects. — Jim Highsmith

Agility is the ability to balance flexibility and stability — Jim Highsmith

We live in an age in which the volume of available information stupefies us. On any relatively interesting subject we can find thousands of Web pages, tens - if not hundreds - of books, and article after article. How do we filter all this information? How do we process all this information? Core values and principles provide one mechanism for processing and filtering information. They steer us in the direction of what is more, or less, important. They help us make product decisions and evaluate development practices. — Jim Highsmith

The capability of self-organizing teams lies in collaboration. When two engineers scratch out a design on a whiteboard, they are collaborating. When team members meet to brainstorm a design, they are collaborating. When team leaders meet to decide whether a product is ready to ship, they are collaborating. The result of any collaboration can be categorized as a tangible deliverable, a decision, or shared knowledge. — Jim Highsmith

Optimization implies that we already know how to do something but that we now need to improve it. Innovation implies that we don't know how to do something, and searching for that knowledge is paramount. — Jim Highsmith

APM's core purpose of creating innovative new products and services means dealing with constant technological and competitive change, generating novel ideas, and continually reducing product development schedules. — Jim Highsmith

Agile project leaders help their team balance at the edge of chaos - some structure, but not too much; adequate documentation, but not too much; some up-front architecture work, but not too much. Finding these balance points is the "art" of agile leadership. — Jim Highsmith

Leaders who want to create adaptive, self-organizing teams steer rather than control - they influence, nudge, facilitate, teach, recommend, assist, urge, counsel, and, yes, direct in some instances. — Jim Highsmith

The quality of results from any collaboration effort are driven by trust and respect — Jim Highsmith

Driving exploration is critical, but knowing when to stop is also. Product development is exploring with a purpose, delivering value within a set of constraints. Frequent, timeboxed iterations compel the development and product teams and executives to make difficult tradeoff decisions early and often during the project. Feature delivery contributes to realistic evaluations because product managers can look at tangible, verifiable results. — Jim Highsmith

Agile methods don't attempt to describe everything that any development effort might need in thousands of pages of documentation. Instead they describe a minimal set of activities that are needed to create swarm intelligence. — Jim Highsmith

Only experience can refine a leader's art. High-uncertainty projects are full of anxiety, change, and ambiguity that the team must deal with. It takes a different style of project management, a different pattern of team operation, and a different type of project leader. I've labeled this type of management leadership-collaboration. — Jim Highsmith

The greatest risk we face in software development is that of overestimating our own knowledge. — Jim Highsmith

A methodology's weight is a product of its size and ceremony. — Jim Highsmith

In high-performance teams, "the leaders managed the principles, and the principles managed the team. — Jim Highsmith

The agile movement supports individuals and teams through dedication to the concepts of self-organization, self-discipline, egalitarianism, respect for individuals, and competency. "Agile" is a socio-technical movement driven by both the desire to create a particular work environment and the belief that an adaptive environment is critical to the goal of delivering innovative products to customers. — Jim Highsmith

APM is about people, their interactions, and creating an environment in which individual creativity and capability erupts to create great products. It's people, not processes, that build great products. — Jim Highsmith

APM focuses on team management, from building self-organizing teams to developing a servant leadership style. It is both more difficult, and ultimately more rewarding than managing tasks. — Jim Highsmith

Documentation is not understanding, process is not discipline, formality is not skill. — Jim Highsmith