The Nine Principles of Agile Planning teaches CFOs, CAOs, CIOs, and Finance leaders the secret to building nimble and dynamic forecasts within their organizations. The Nine Principles blend real-world processes, people, and cloud tech to get your business forecasting the right way. By adopting the Nine Principles, you can create world-class forecasting that reacts to real-time changes in your business and reduces risk. You will be a forecasting hero! Too many CFOs and Finance teams fail their organizations with slow and cumbersome forecasting and budgeting cycles that have limited adoption beyond Finance. Management consultants, software vendors, and your stakeholders have ideas to fix—but you need something game-changing. The Nine Principles of Agile Planning are the game-changer you need! Investing in a new forecasting process will take money, people, and time, with a significant opportunity cost of not working on other things. This investment is no different from developing a new product, building a factory, or hiring staff. Any business investment like this must earn an ROI. The Nine Principles of Agile Planning is a framework to give you the greatest chance of success of achieving this ROI by building a forecasting process to provide real operational value that helps run the organization on a day-to-day basis. Learn the latest strategies from getting forecasting closer to your front line business teams, linking variable items to operational activity levels, planning by initiative, evaluating strategic big-bets, using modular planning, choosing a modern cloud planning tool, finding an expert, getting away from financial statement-centered forecasting, and using real-time IoT data to build operational early-warning systems. Make forecasting easy for your users by adopting the latest automation technologies and learn how you can automatically alert your planners when there is a trend that requires their attention. If you are evaluating cloud planning technologies from Adaptive Insights, Anaplan, OneStream, Oracle EPM (Hyperion), Planful, or SAP, the Nine Principles is the must-read guide to select the right tools, processes, and consultants to create agile and nimble planning in your organization. Use this chance to develop an Agile Planning philosophy that encourages rapid development of plans that can be quickly iterated, are easy to understand, and actionable. Take advantage of the golden age of cloud-based planning tools to facilitate these Agile Planning objectives. Create world-class budgeting and forecasting by adopting the Nine Principles! The Nine Principles of Agile Planning provides strategies to address issues like: - Lack of budgeting and forecasting adoption in your organization. - Forecasts that are slow to update and frequently wrong. - Decision-makers are ignoring Finance’s forecasts. - Forecasting is focused on Finance and not front-line business leaders. - Out-dated planning technology that is inflexible and hard to use for non-Finance users. - Treating all elements of your business equally during forecasting. - Planning using too much detail. - Using inefficient planning methodologies approaches. - Not using real-world initiatives to drive organizational change. - Failing to use real-world operational activity levels to inform financial forecasts. - Making the planning process too time-consuming and challenging. - Not integrating new real-time IoT data sources to build forecasting early-warning systems. - Failing to tailor planning to each operational function.

Agile Estimating and Planning is the definitive, practical guide to estimating and planning agile projects. In this book, Agile Alliance cofounder Mike Cohn discusses the philosophy of agile estimating and planning and shows you exactly how to get the job done, with real-world examples and case studies. Concepts are clearly illustrated and readers are guided, step by step, toward how to answer the following questions: What will we build? How big will it be? When must it be done? How much can I really complete by then? You will first learn what makes a good plan-and then what makes it agile. Using the techniques in Agile Estimating and Planning, you can stay agile from start to finish, saving time, conserving resources, and accomplishing more. Highlights include: Why conventional prescriptive planning fails and why agile planning works How to estimate feature size using story points and ideal days–and when to use each How and when to re-estimate How to prioritize features using both financial and nonfinancial approaches How to split large features into smaller, more manageable ones How to plan iterations and predict your team's initial rate of progress How to schedule projects that have unusually high uncertainty or schedule-related risk How to estimate projects that will be worked on by multiple teams Agile Estimating and Planning supports any agile, semiagile, or iterative process, including Scrum, XP, Feature-Driven Development, Crystal, Adaptive Software Development, DSDM, Unified Process, and many more. It will be an indispensable resource for every development manager, team leader, and team member.

This is a comprehensive guide to Scrum for all (team members, managers, and executives). If you want to use Scrum to develop innovative products and services that delight your customers, this is the complete, single-source reference you've been searching for. This book provides a common understanding of Scrum, a shared vocabulary that can be used in applying it, and practical knowledge for deriving maximum value from it.

What does it take to lead and manage your company’s tech? Becoming an effective IT leader and manager presents a host of challenges—from anticipating emerging technologies, to managing relationships with senior executives, vendors, and employees, to communicating with the board. A good IT leader must also be a strong business leader. This book—now thoroughly updated with a new preface by the authors and current tech details and terminology—invites you to accompany new CIO Jim Barton as he steps up to leadership at his company. You’ll get a deeper understanding of the role of IT in your own organization as you see Jim struggle through a tough first year, handling (and fumbling) all kinds of management challenges. Although fictional, the scenarios are based on the authors’ long experience working with real-life companies across industries and sectors. The Adventures of an IT Leader is both an insightful story and an instructive guidebook. You can read it from beginning to end or treat it as a series of cases, skipping around to different chapters that address your most pressing needs. (For example, if you need to learn about crisis management and security, read chapters 10–12.) You can also test yourself and think about how to use the book’s lessons in your own company by reading the authors’ “Reflection” questions at the end of each chapter. This book is your indispensable manual for IT management and leadership, no matter what business you’re in.

Your Hands-On, "In-the-Trenches" Guide to Successfully Leading AgileProjectsAgile methods promise to infuse development with unprecedented flexibility, speed, and valueand these promises are attracting IT organizations worldwide. However, agile methods often fail to clearly define the manager s role, and many managers have been reluctant to buy in. Now, expert project manager Sanjiv Augustine introduces agility "from the manager s point of view, offering a proven management framework that addresses everything from team building to project control. Augustine bridges the disconnect between the assumptions and techniques of traditional and agile management, demonstrating why agility is better aligned with today s project realities, and how to simplify your transition. Using a detailed case study, he shows how agile methods can scale to succeed in even the largest projects: Defining a high-value role for the manager in agile project environmentsRefocusing on "outcomes--not rigid plans, processes, or controlsStructuring and building adaptive, self-organizing "organic teams"Forming a guiding vision that aligns your team behind a common purposeEmpowering your team with the information it needs to succeedManaging the flow of customer value from one creative stage to the nextLeveraging your team members strengths as "whole persons"Implementing full-life-cycle agility: from planning and coding to maintenance and knowledge transfer Customizing agile methods to your unique environmentBecoming an "adaptive leader" who can inspire and energize agile teams Whether you re a technical or business manager, "Managing Agile Projectsgives you all the tools you need to implement agility in "your environmentand reap its full benefits. "Managing Agile Projects is part of the Robert C. Martin series.(c) Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

The global economy and free market philosophy have resulted in higher global competition and increased expectations from customers. It is obvious that new approaches are needed to satisfy demands and many of them fall under a broad umbrella called agile. To capitalize fully on the benefits of agile, one must first understand the concepts that underpin it. In this book, we first identify many concepts that various approaches advocate for agile and group them into three areas forming a simple, robust system. Then, we describe the most useful agile methods in savage summaries regardless of the approach that promotes them, grouping them logically and showing how to use them. We have an agnostic agile model that can be useful to anyone using any form of agile. Both concepts for being agile and techniques for doing agile are summarized in this book and there are several ways to use this book. To understand the concepts of agile, consult Chapters 3, 4, and 5. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 will help you learn and perform agile tools and techniques.

The rules and practices for Scrum—a simple process for managing complex projects—are few, straightforward, and easy to learn. But Scrum’s simplicity itself—its lack of prescription—can be disarming, and new practitioners often find themselves reverting to old project management habits and tools and yielding lesser results. In this illuminating series of case studies, Scrum co-creator and evangelist Ken Schwaber identifies the real-world lessons—the successes and failures—culled from his years of experience coaching companies in agile project management. Through them, you’ll understand how to use Scrum to solve complex problems and drive better results—delivering more valuable software faster. Gain the foundation in Scrum theory—and practice—you need to: Rein in even the most complex, unwieldy projects Effectively manage unknown or changing product requirements Simplify the chain of command with self-managing development teams Receive clearer specifications—and feedback—from customers Greatly reduce project planning time and required tools Build—and release—products in 30-day cycles so clients get deliverables earlier Avoid missteps by regularly inspecting, reporting on, and fine-tuning projects Support multiple teams working on a large-scale project from many geographic locations Maximize return on investment!