63 Quotes by Jim Highsmith

The quality of results from any collaboration effort are driven by trust and respect.

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.

The agile value “Delivering Value over Meeting Constraints” provides a focus for rethinking how we measure performance on projects.

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

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

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.

The agile value “Delivering Value over Meeting Constraints” provides a focus for rethinking how we measure performance on projects. Although constraints such as cost and time are important, they should be secondary to creating value for customers. All too often, we focus on what is easily measurable and ignore really important characteristics that are harder to quantify. Agile development attempts to change that bias and focus on the most important things, and value is at the top of that list.

Project leaders must be champions of technical excellence; they must support and advocate technical excellence while maintaining a watchful eye on other project objectives.

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