Agile Project Management

Introduction

See the agile manifesto - http://agilemanifesto.org/

Reference Material

http://www.ccpace.com/Resources/documents/AgileProjectManagement.pdf

http://www.rheingold.com/cooperation/decisionmaking.pdf

http://necsi.org/research/multiscale/Civilization.html

http://www.edgeperspectives.com/index3.shtml

Summary Overview

Traditional Project Management

Traditional Project Management, and Product Development seeks to manage, control, organize and coordinate projects, to create order via:

• Hierarchical Organization

• Increasing Control

• Rigid procedures

• People as "resources"

• Reductionist problem solving

• Up-front planning to manage risks, and to enhance predictability

(adapted from pg.3 http://www.ccpace.com/Resources/documents/AgileProjectManagement.pdf)

Complex Adaptive ("Agile") Project Management Framework

"Agile" project management borrows from Complex Adaptive System principles.

(see page 8 table 1 http://www.ccpace.com/Resources/documents/AgileProjectManagement.pdf )

Framework Outline

Guiding Vision

"Guiding Vision" has an immediate effect on influence of behavior of people involved

Teamwork and Collaboration

People are treated as autonomous, intelligent indviduals. Whenever possible, decision making power is handed over to the participants, to allow them to guide in collaborative ways

Simple Rules

Rather than micro-managed control, we all agree to a set of simple rules that guide complex distributed development

Open Information

This site, and all sites, and all communications are open, and constitute open information. Our processes are open and transparent.

Light Touch

Rather than trying to force the direction of evolution, we scale back imposed order, in favor of emergent order. We are flexible, and allow many directions to emerge from any given point. Our goal is to support and enable emergent order.

Agile Vigilance

Leaders, coordinators, people with responsibility pay attention to what is going on, and adapt to the emergent order, rather than trying to force what is evolving and emerging. Instead, they rely on the simple rules, the Guiding vision, open information, and Light Touch to help them adapt to what is emerging

Applying to our processes

All of us Propose a Guiding Vision, and all of us are then responsible for working towards emergent order over imposed order.

Open Product Development is a proposed Guiding Vision, that we are trying to implement. All of the projects evolving at Category:Zero Hour are proposed guiding visions, that try to connect with real-world solutions.

Ideas, proposals, projects are born on the (openfarmtech) wiki. When at least 1 person committs to them, we ask them to post it as a project (using content-type "project") on the Drupal site, with details there, and links back to wiki pages. If at least 2 people committ to the project, then we create a group/core team portal for the project or product. This can be a mirror of existing external workspaces if this is a parternship. At minimum, we at least update status on core team portal group pages for each project or product.

This expands OSE product development platform to projects that are not actual product development.

Constraining rules are proposed, but can be adjusted. So that every project does not ultimately need to follow a rigid set of cycles, but cycles that are most useful to it's own development.