Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software has a collection of 101 Agile Quotes.
There are few I have heart burn with, but the vast majority are right on.
Some of my favorite:
- Planning is everything, plans are nothing - Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke. This is a much misused quote. In the military business, like all businesses that spend lots of money, have high risk, and high reward, we need a plan. That plan is a strategy for the success of the project, be it D-Day or an ERP deployment. That strategy is actually a hypothesis, and the hypothesis needs to have tests. That's what the plan describes. The tests that confirm the strategy is working. To conduct the tests, we need to perform work. When the test shows to strategy is not working, we need a new strategy. That is we change the plan.
- To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable, but to certain is to be ridiculous - Chinese Proverb. Another misused quote. All project work is uncertain. Managing in the presence of uncertainty is part of good management. Uncertainty creates risk, and risk management is how adults manage projects - Time Lister.
- Scrum without automation is like driving a sports car on a dirt track - you won't experience the full potential, you will get frustrated, and you will probably end up blaming the car - Ilan Goldstein - tools are the basis of all process and process improvement. Paper on the wall, software management tools. Those who suggest that tools are ruining agile aren't working on complex project.
- If you define the problem successfully, you almost have the solution - Steve Jobs. This is the role of Plans, Integrated Master Planning in our domain, where the outcomes are described in units of Effectiveness and Performance in an increasing maturity cycle.
