Jim Highsmith is a renowned expert in agile project management and leadership with over 25 years of experience. He was one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto and helped pioneer agile approaches. Highsmith believes that agile leaders focus on adapting to changes rather than rigidly following a plan. He has authored several influential books on agile topics and advocates for balancing ideals with practical implementation. Highsmith continues to encourage innovation in agile methods and bridging differences between various approaches.

1. Jim Highsmith
A traditional project manager focuses
on following the plan with minimal
changes, whereas an agile leader
focuses on adapting successfully to
inevitable changes.

2. Experience
25 years experience as an IT manager,
project manager, product manager,
consultant, and software developer.
Consulted with IT, software, and
product-development companies in the
U.S., Europe, Canada, Japan, India,
SouthAfrica, Australia, and New Zealand
Help them adapt to an accelerated pace
of development in increasingly complex,
unstable environments.
Adaptive Software
Development
Agile Software
Development
Ecosystems
2
BS (Electrical
Engineering)
MS (Management)
World-renowned
consultant
IT Software and
Project Development
Industries

3. Work
Coauthor of the
Agile Manifesto
Founding member and
on the first board of
The Agile Alliance
Coauthor of the
Declaration
Interdependence
1 2
4
Industry Contributions &
Affiliations
3
Cofounder and first
president of the
Agile Leadership
Network
3

4. Publications
Adaptive Leadership
Accelerating
Enterprise Agility
(Addison-Wesley
2013).
Agile Project
Management
Creating Innovative
Products (Addison-
Wesley 2004, 2009)
Agile Software
Development
Ecosystems (Addison-
Wesley, 2002)
1 2 3
Published several articles and
books.A selection are:
4
Adaptive Software
Development
Managing Complex
Systems(Dorset
House, 2000)
Co-editor, with Alistair
Cockburn
Agile Software
Development Series of
books
4 5

5. Agile
Manifesto for Agile Software
Development
Agile is MINDSET |
Designed by 4VALUES |
Defined by 12 PRINCIPLES |
Manifested Through UNLIMITED
NUMBER OF PRACTICES
5

6. Awards and
recognition
Highsmith was one of the 17
original signatories of the Agile
Manifesto
2005 International
Stevens Award
2000 Jolt Award
6

7. Legacy
Insights posts
The Future of Agile Agile Bureaucracy What is Agility?
Dispelling Myths Reducing CycleTime Change is not Change 7

8. The Future
of Agile:
Innovators,
Imitators,
and Idiots
• Encouraged: DevOps, continuous delivery, Lean,
Kanban,Agile/Adaptive Leadership, and more
• Esoteric arguments—they care about results.
Idealism and innovation - vibrant movement, but
balanced dose of practicality.
• The power and attractiveness - lies in its values;
Agile Manifesto and Declaration of
Interdependence.
• Scrum teams - Scrum framework - Sister
approaches of lean, Extreme Programming,
Kanban, Feature-Driven Development, DSDM,
Crystal,Adaptive, and more. -Mike Cohn
• Agile values and principles, continuing to
innovate, balancing b/w idealism and practically
and unify rather than splinter.
8

9. Agile
Bureaucracy:
When
Practices
become
Principles
• Rigid interpretations of the principles. E.g.:
Deliver working software frequently, from a
couple of weeks to a couple of months.
• Practices become static and then elevated to the
level of principle — something that can’t be
violated. E.g.: A good practice, “daily standups”
• Good practices become bad principles. E.g.:You
can’t do that because it’s against our company or
team’s principles.
• Pseudo-principles effect: Good principles can be
misapplied.
• Principles are invaluable to teams and
organizations. E.g.: Agile movement has been so
successful, its foundational principles expressed.
9

10. What
is
Agility
?
• Agility in two statements:
• Agility is the ability to
both create and respond to change in order
to profit in a turbulent business
environment.
• Agility is the ability to balance flexibility and
stability.
• Agility connotes a lack of structure, but the
absence of structure creates chaos
• Complexity theory tells us that innovation.
• Understand factors require stabilization and
ones encourage exploration. 10

11. [Webinar] -
Dispelling
myths about
scaling agile
projects
• Agile scaling myth goes:
• Agile development works well for smaller projects, but
doesn’t scale to larger ones
• At what size does delivering value to customers fail to
be important?
• Can large organizations afford to be inflexible, rigid,
and unresponsive?”
• Webinar provides a framework by focusing on three
key issues:
• Practices and processes as complexity and uncertainty
increase.
• Teams on the critical issue of customer value.
• From single self-organizing, collaborative teams to of
self-organizing, collaborative teams of teams .
11

12. Reducing
Cycle
Time
• Radical reductions in cycle time - rapid business
responsiveness and Continuous Delivery.
• If it’s hard to do, do it more often! From lean
manufacturing.
• How can we do something frequently? - combination
of simplification, eliminating constraints, and
automation.
• Goldratt’s theory of constraints - process bottlenecks.
• Q/A : How could we simplify this process or activity OR
What can we eliminate or streamline in order to reduce
the time to do this from 6 weeks to 1.
• Automation always comes to mind as an enabler to
doing things more often.
• Espouses the agile value of responding to change.
12

13. Change
is not
Chang
e
• Fail to recognize at times is that change isn’t change.
• Different tools—different levels of innovation—to
address each, classifications incremental,
differentiating, and disruptive.
• Incremental change: Product, practice, or process.
• Differentiating changes: Differentiation from the
competition - short-to-medium timeframe.
• Disruptive change:Toughest change to respond - cause
companies to fail if they don’t respond appropriately.
• Innovating to create an entirely new market, or change
the market economics substantially - Clayton
Christensen in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma.
• Gets much harder - we move - from incremental to
differentiating to disruptive.
13

14. Quotes:
1.The Future of Agile: Innovators, Imitators, and Idiots
2. Agile Bureaucracy:When Practices become Principles
3.What is Agility?
4. [Webinar] Dispelling myths about scaling agile projects
5. Reducing CycleTime
6. Change is not Change
7.Thoughtworks
8. Revolvy for biography
14
References:
“In an agile project the team takes care of the tasks and
the project leader takes care of the team.”
― Jim Highsmith
“At the core of healthy team relationships is trust and
respect.”
― Jim Highsmith

15. Presented
By: Muhammad Ahsan Misbah
18K-0732
DaniyalJamil
18K-0712
Shahzad Mehmood
18K-0715
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