| Have a clear direction for the team to be moving in, and communicate that objective to each of the team members clearly That doesn't really get at the heart of modern project management thinking in the software industry because it is as applicable to waterfall as Extreme Programming. The key is how long the team can move in a direction without course correction. Contemporary thinking boils down to the team and each individual can continue moving in a particular direction until the first sign that something isn't adding value for the customer or is reducing velocity. Then direction must be changed immediately. The better the instrumentation of the development process the closer immediately gets to instantaneously. Continuous integration means that broken builds bubble up to the team in a matter of minutes rather than days or weeks and that regressions can be fixed as they are introduced. Short iteration cycles mean that the customer is actively engaged with the state of the project and has responsibility for prioritizing features. This whole customer thing means that management is not just downward it's upward toward the VP and sidewise toward customers and vendors. The biggest mistake new managers make is to confuse management with supervision. Good managers are like ASE certified mechanics, they don't come out to your house to top off the oil. They identify and triage and possibly fix the leak when the car comes into the shop for scheduled maintenance. Scrum/agile/extreme are ways to make sure that the oil gets changed regularly and avoid leaks via maintenance. It's not waiting for the "idiot light" [1] to come on. These things are not down the road. The techniques help a manager avoid their fallibilities and frailties and foibles when it comes to human interaction. They're there for the same reasons Ruby on Rails is there...they provide a framework that avoids having to write an MVC application in C. Good luck. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell-tale_%28automotive%29 |