Welcome to the Agile Practice Guide! This guide was developed as a collaborative effort by the Project Management Institute (PMI) and Agile Alliance®. The members of the core writing team who developed this practice guide included volunteers from both organizations, drawing on subject matter expertise from a broad range of current practitioners and leaders from a diverse range of backgrounds, beliefs, and cultures.
This practice guide provides practical guidance geared toward project leaders and team members adapting to an agile approach in planning and executing projects. While our core writing team recognizes there is staunch support to use predictive approaches and conversely, passion around shifting to an agile mindset, values, and principles, this practice guide covers a practical approach to project agility. This practice guide represents a bridge to understanding the pathway from a predictive approach to an agile approach. In fact, there are similar activities between the two, such as planning, that are handled differently but occur in both environments.
Our core writing team used an agile mindset to collaborate and manage the development of this first edition of the practice guide. As technology and culture changes, future updates and refinements to the practice guide will reflect current approaches.
Our core team adopted a more informal, relaxed writing style for this practice guide than is typical for PMI standards. The guide incorporates new elements, such as tips, sidebars, and case studies to better illustrate key points and concepts. Our team intends for these changes to make this practice guide more readable and user-friendly.
This practice guide goes beyond addressing the use of agile in the computer software development industry, because agile has expanded into non-software development environments. Manufacturing, education, healthcare and other industries are becoming agile to varying degrees and this use beyond software is within the scope of this practice guide.
