Jim Highsmith Quotes

#1. APM is about people, their interactions, and creating an environment in which individual creativity and capability erupts to create great products. It's people, not processes, that build great products.

Jim Highsmith

#2. In high-performance teams, "the leaders managed the principles, and the principles managed the team.

Jim Highsmith

#3. 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

#4. Agility is principally about mindset, not practices.

Jim Highsmith

#5. In an agile project the team takes care of the tasks and the project leader takes care of the team.

Jim Highsmith

#6. If you find that your organization can't make the hard decisions that Scrum demands, then high-risk, uncertain projects have very little probability of success in your organization.

Jim Highsmith

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. Agility is the ability to balance flexibility and stability

Jim Highsmith

#10. Agile methods don't attempt to describe everything that any development effort might need in thousands of pages of documentation. Instead they describe a minimal set of activities that are needed to create swarm intelligence.

Jim Highsmith

#11. Agile Project Management focuses on selecting the right skills for project team members and molding them into productive teams.

Jim Highsmith

#12. If you have unskilled people who work poorly together, no amount of process will save your projects.

Jim Highsmith

#13. Process is not a substitute for skill.

Jim Highsmith

#14. The best way to get a project done faster is to start sooner

Jim Highsmith

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. The quality of results from any collaboration effort are driven by trust and respect

Jim Highsmith

#18. Agility is the ability to adapt and respond to change ... agile organizations view change as an opportunity, not a threat.

Jim Highsmith

#19. Agile Project Management is an execution-biased model, not a planning-and-control-biased model.

Jim Highsmith

#20. The feature delivery approach helps define a workable interface between customers and product developers.

Jim Highsmith

#21. The greatest risk we face in software development is that of overestimating our own knowledge.

Jim Highsmith

#22. In my early years of iterative development, I thought timeboxes were actually about time. What I came to realize is that timeboxes are actually about forcing tough decisions.

Jim Highsmith

#23. A methodology's weight is a product of its size and ceremony.

Jim Highsmith

#24. People don't change that much. Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That is hard enough (Buckingham and Coffman 1999).

Jim Highsmith

#25. Peel back the facade of rigorous methodology projects and ask why the project was successful, and the answer is people.

Jim Highsmith

#26. 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

#27. At the core of healthy team relationships is trust and respect.

Jim Highsmith

#28. The Agile Project Management principles and framework encourage learning and adapting as an integral part of delivering value to customers.

Jim Highsmith

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. Self-discipline is also built on competence, persistence, and the willingness to assume accountability for results. Competence is more than skill and ability; it's attitude and experience.

Jim Highsmith

#32. 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

#33. Iterative development, when accompanied with reasonable end-of-iteration reviews - product, technical, process, team - is also self-correcting.

Jim Highsmith

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. The iterative piece of agile can be defined by four key terms: iterative, feature-based, timeboxed, and incremental.

Jim Highsmith

#37. Innovative ideas aren't generated in structured, authoritarian environments but in an adaptive culture based on the principles of self-organization and self-discipline.

Jim Highsmith

#38. Dialogue, discussion, and participatory decision making are all part of building self-discipline.

Jim Highsmith

#39. The agile value "Delivering Value over Meeting Constraints" provides a focus for rethinking how we measure performance on projects.

Jim Highsmith

#40. Documentation is not understanding, process is not discipline, formality is not skill.

Jim Highsmith

#41. Optimization implies that we already know how to do something but that we now need to improve it. Innovation implies that we don't know how to do something, and searching for that knowledge is paramount.

Jim Highsmith