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The Agile Revolution

Linear thinking, prescriptive processes and standardized, unvarying practices are no match for today's volatile product development environment--or any "exploratory" project, for that matter. As processes swing from anticipatory to adaptive, project management must change also. It must be geared to mobility, experimentation and speed. But first of all, it must be geared to business objectives.

Jim Highsmith

This article is the first in an exclusive series on agile project management, adapted from the new book Agile Project Management (Addison-Wesley, 2004) by Jim Highsmith, cofounder of the Agile Alliance and director of the agile project management practice at Cutter Consortium.

Product development teams are facing a quiet revolution in which both engineers and managers are struggling to adjust. In industry after industry — pharmaceuticals, software, automobiles, integrated circuits — customer demands for continuous innovation and the plunging cost of experimentation are signaling a massive switch from anticipatory to adaptive styles of development. This switch plays havoc with …


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