Chapter 12. Governing Agile Projects

Agile development began its evolution at the team level, first appealing to software developers, and as successful projects emerged from these teams, managers and executives began to notice. Since then the agile movement has expanded, and the growing visibility of agile methods has created a new set of challenges—or opportunities depending on your viewpoint. The main challenge: How do we move from agile projects to agile organizations? This challenge generates questions from senior executives ranging from how to measure success to how iterative development can be managed alongside traditional life cycle projects. Executives want to know how agile methods impact them directly and which implementation details that they need to worry about.

The concepts and practices behind agile methods are not limited to development teams, so executives need to understand how agile development impacts their organizations, project portfolios, and overall project governance. Referring to the Agile Enterprise Framework (Chapter 5, Figure 5-1) this chapter will concentrate on Portfolio Governance—how executives monitor projects within the context of their entire project portfolio. The top level in this framework might be called Portfolio Management, but the entirety of that subject is outside the scope of this book. The discussion in this chapter covers three portfolio management topics: Portfolio Governance (the primary topic), methodological “fit” for projects, and “chunking” at a portfolio level.