## B.1 - The PM²-Agile Principles **1. The highest priority is to satisfy the client through early and continuous delivery of valuable solutions.** The goal of solution delivery should be the delivery of an actual consumable and valuable solution. Agile teams move away from a strategy where they try to think through all the details upfront, thereby increasing both project risk and cost. Instead, they invest a bit of time thinking through the critical issues, allowing the details to evolve over time as they learn through incremental creation of the solution. **2. Changing Requirements are welcome, even late in the solution delivery lifecycle.** Agile processes harness change for the stakeholders’ advantage. Requirements will change throughout a project. Traditional project teams often adopt change management processes designed to prevent/limit scope creep. However, these are in fact change prevention and not change management processes. An Agile change management approach ensures that functionality is developed following a well-established priority and requirements evolve to reflect stakeholders’ improved understanding of what they need. **3. Deliver value frequently through working solutions.** Agile teams should deliver value at the end of each iteration. Iterations’ length should be between two and four weeks, with a preference for the shorter. Frequent delivery of a workable solution gives business stakeholders the opportunity to contribute with timely feedback, keeping the project transparent and allowing adjustments in the project’s direction when needed. **4. Business people and project team must work together throughout the project.** Regular access to the project stakeholders or their representatives is crucial for a successful project. Agile teams adopt practices such as on-site client and active stakeholder participation, and adopt tools and techniques that enable stakeholders to be actively involved in solution delivery. **5. Create teams with motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need to self- organise, and trust them to get the job done.** Too many organisations have a vision that they can hire hordes of relatively unskilled people, provide them with a CMMI or ISO-compliant process description, and they will successfully develop solutions. This does not seem to work that well in practice. Agile teams, on the other hand, realise that a team has to be built with people who are willing to work together collaboratively and learn from each other. They have the humility to respect each other and realise that people are a primary success factor in solution delivery. They should be allowed to create an environment which fosters collaboration, use of tools that they find most effective, and have the freedom to customise and optimise their team’s development process. **6. The most efficient and effective method of communication is face-to-face conversation.** For a delivery team to succeed its members must communicate and collaborate effectively. People can communicate in many different ways, and face-to-face communication in a shared and collocation based environment is often the most effective way to do so. Endless emails and exhaustive documents are far less effective than the immediate feedback of conversation. Distributed teams cannot be an excuse for reverting back to extensive documentation practices since video chat or other communication systems can be used to support face-to-face conversations. **7. The primary measure of progress is the usefulness of what has been delivered.** The delivery of a useful, consumable solution that provides value to the project stakeholders is the primary measure of project progress. This solution should meet their changing needs and not some form of ‘earned value’ measure based on documentation’s delivery or the holding of meetings. **8. Continuous attention on quality.** Following the principle of continuous attention to quality, Agile reduces corrective measures such as test by adopting practices so that quality is built-in, reducing the need for fixing defects. Agile practitioners know that they need to start with high-quality work products and keep the quality high via refactoring, full regression test suites, etc. **9. Simplicity – the art of maximising the amount of work not done — is essential.** Agile developers focus on high value activities and strive to maximise their stakeholders’ return on investment. From a Lean point of view, simplicity is essential so that only the most important things are worked on, reducing variability and the associated delays. **10. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to improve, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.** Agile teams reflect frequently (at least by the end of each iteration) on how they are performing as a team. They adopt techniques such as retrospectives to reflect on their practices, generate insights about how they can improve and define concrete actions to materialise those insights, preferably sooner rather than later. When such a short feedback loop is an inherent part of the process through an established ritual, the sensitivity to inefficient and ineffective patterns is higher, and lessons learned are acted upon on a regular basis, not postponed indefinitely. **11. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The Project Team should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.** Just as people cannot sprint for an entire marathon, a solution cannot be developed by forcing people to continuously work over their capacity. **12. Agile practices should be enterprise-aware, taking into consideration IT governance, enterprise architecture, and interoperability requirements. Agile teams should be able to collaborate effectively with teams and stakeholders following alternative approaches.** When practising Agile in big organisations, there is a need to enable collaboration between Agile and other project approaches while complying with various IT governance, enterprise architecture, interoperability, and operational requirements. Failing to do so can bring, at best, local successes for a short period of time, and not sustainable solutions, an essential part of the overall organisation.