Wolfgang > Wolfgang's Quotes

“We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”
― Ayn Rand

“Big egos are big shields for lots of empty space.”
― Diana Black

“Identify your problems but give your power and energy to solutions.”
― Tony Robbins

“Authoritarian managers use power, often in the form of fear, to get people to do something their way. Leaders depend for the most part on influence rather than power, and influence derives from respect rather than fear. Respect, in turn, is based on qualities such as integrity, ability, fairness, truthfulness—in short, on character. Leaders are part of the team, and although they are given organizational authority, their real authority isn't delegated top-down but earned bottom-up. From the outside, a managed team and a led team can look the same, but from the inside they feel very different.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“A traditional project manager focuses on following the plan with minimal changes, whereas an agile leader focuses on adapting successfully to inevitable changes.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Agility is principally about mindset, not practices.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“If we want to build great products, we need great people. If we want to attract and keep great people, we need great principles”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“agile development reflects a product lifecycle approach (continuous delivery of value), rather than a project approach (begin-end). While an individual release of a product can be managed as a project, an agile approach views a release as a single stage in a product’s ongoing evolution.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“In high-performance teams, "the leaders managed the principles, and the principles managed the team.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“When applying agile practices at the portfolio level, similar benefits accrue: • Demonstrable results—Every quarter or so products, or at least deployable pieces of products, are developed, implemented, tested, and accepted. Short projects deliver chunks of functionality incrementally. • Customer feedback—Each quarter product managers review results and provide feedback, and executives can view progress in terms of working products. • Better portfolio planning—Portfolio planning is more realistic because it is based on deployed whole or partial products. • Flexibility—Portfolios can be steered toward changing business goals and higher-value projects because changes are easy to incorporate at the end of each quarter. Because projects produce working products, partial value is captured rather than being lost completely as usually happens with serial projects that are terminated early. • Productivity—There is a hidden productivity improvement with agile methods from the work not done. Through constant negotiation, small projects are both eliminated and pared down.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“APM focuses on team management, from building self-organizing teams to developing a servant leadership style. It is both more difficult, and ultimately more rewarding than managing tasks.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“In an agile project the team takes care of the tasks and the project leader takes care of the team.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“At the core of healthy team relationships is trust and respect.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“In fact, in an agile project, technical excellence is measured by both capacity to deliver customer value today and create an adaptable product for tomorrow.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“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.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“The tail is the time period from “code slush” (true code freezes are rare) or “feature freeze” to actual deployment. This is the time period when companies do some or all of the following: beta testing, regression testing, product integration, integration testing, documentation, defect fixing. The worst “tail” I’ve encountered was 18 months—18 months from feature freeze to product release, and most of that time was spent in QA. I’ve”
― Jim Highsmith, Adaptive Leadership

“What is the difference between project management and project leadership? Although there is an elusive line between them, the core difference is that management deals with complexity, whereas leadership deals with change.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Agile Project Management -like its lean development counterparts- streamlines the development process, concentrating on value-adding activities and eliminating overhead and compliance activities.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Agile project leaders help their team balance at the edge of chaos—some structure, but not too much; adequate documentation, but not too much; some up-front architecture work, but not too much. Finding these balance points is the "art" of agile leadership.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“In a self-organized team, individuals take accountability for managing their own workload, shift work among themselves based on need and best fit, and take responsibility for team effectiveness. Team members have considerable leeway in how they deliver results, they are self-disciplined in their accountability for those results, and they work within a flexible framework.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“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.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Creating new products and services differs from making minor enhancements to existing ones. The first must focus on innovation and adaptability, whereas the second usually focuses on efficiency and optimization. Efficiency delivers products and services that we can think of. Innovation delivers products that we can barely imagine. Efficiency and optimization are appropriate drivers for a production project, whereas innovation and creativity should drive an exploration-type project. A production mindset can restrict our vision to what appears doable. An exploration mindset helps us explore what seems impossible.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“The iterative piece of agile can be defined by four key terms: iterative, feature-based, timeboxed, and incremental.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Innovation delivers products that we can barely imagine. Efficiency and optimization are appropriate drivers for a production project, whereas innovation and creativity should drive an exploration-type project. A production mindset can restrict our vision to what appears doable. An exploration mindset helps us explore what seems impossible.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“We live in an age in which the volume of available information stupefies us. On any relatively interesting subject we can find thousands of Web pages, tens—if not hundreds—of books, and article after article. How do we filter all this information? How do we process all this information? Core values and principles provide one mechanism for processing and filtering information. They steer us in the direction of what is more, or less, important. They help us make product decisions and evaluate development practices.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Leaders who want to create adaptive, self-organizing teams steer rather than control—they influence, nudge, facilitate, teach, recommend, assist, urge, counsel, and, yes, direct in some instances.”
― Jim Highsmith

“The quality of results from any collaboration effort are driven by trust and respect”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“APM's core purpose of creating innovative new products and services means dealing with constant technological and competitive change, generating novel ideas, and continually reducing product development schedules.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“When project leaders focus on delivery, they add value to projects. When they focus on planning and control, they tend to add overhead.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“Agile Project Management is an execution-biased model, not a planning-and-control-biased model.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products