Amazon shows Agile outsells PMBOK Guide Sixth Edition
John Stenbeck, PMP, CDAI, DASSM, PMI-ACP, CSM, CSP
On Saturday, October 21, Agile Almanac Book 2 was released on Amazon and rocketed to Amazon #1 Best Seller surpassing even the newest PMBOK Guide Sixth Edition (as shown in the image). Does that mean that Agile has replaced Traditional project management? Or is something more nuanced happening?
To understand it is helpful to realize that the Agile Almanac - Book 2 has been reviewed by Jeff Sutherland, Scott Ambler, Bas Vodde, and Dean Leffingwell's co-founder Drew Jemilo and Inbar Oren. They were generous beyond all expectations, investing their time to ensure the chapter on their approaches were accurate and concise (so you can quickly discern which one is the best fit for your needs). It was also reviewed and endorsed by Jim Snyder, PMI co-founder and the Institute's first President.
In the Foreword that Jim wrote, he could could have been speaking for Jeff, Scott, Bas, and Dean as well, when he said, “This exciting approach to using the Agile processes offers new and well thought out ideas and best practices that will go a long way to making sense out of the ever-changing, chaotic, project management environment in which we all live and work… and impacts every part of our working life.”
The Agile Almanac Book 2 is intended to be a Rosetta stone for serious Agile practitioners covering ALL of the Scaled Agile "Big 8" approaches in one place with unique, side-by-side, coverage of Scrum of Scrums (SoS), Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe?), Disciplined Agile (DA), Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), Kanban, DevOps, the Agile content in the Project Management Institute, A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, (PMBOK? Guide) - Sixth Edition, Project Management Institute, Inc. 2017, and the Agile Integration Framework (AIF).
Agile has become mainstream and proven its value in so many industries outside of software. The PMBOK? Guide has integrated it. The newest challenge, the new marketplace demand, is for robust, reliable ways to scale Agile to uber-large projects and Programs including multi-team and remote / distributed environments. The future of Agile is not an "either / or" choice excluding Traditional tools, it is a "both / and" choice were true professionals in project management and solutions development come together and integrate Agile and Traditional so that outcomes benefit everyone - the customer, the business, the stakeholders and the development teams!
Grueling months of collaboration between the 12 authors - Diane Brady, Diane McCann, Doug Martin, Guilherme Motta, James Sperry, Joe Montalbano, John Stenbeck, Mark Phillipy, Michael Williams, Nichole Tubiolo, Rick Morris and Steve McGee went into the ambitious undertaking to create a book that serves the global community delivering Programs and uber-large projects in an immense number of industries and institutions by providing practical, detailed content and advice focused on the principle that Agile can, and must, be scaled as an extension of Lean Principles using integrative thinking.
Based on the response reported by Amazon, the idea behind this book has struck a chord in the marketplace by allowing Practitioners and Organizations to select precisely the content they need and zero in on the best way to apply it in the context of their environments!
Helping You Deliver Projects Better! Founder The PMO Squad, Founder The PMO Leader, Co-Founder VPMMA, Host Project Management Office Hours
7 年Agile vs Waterfall is an expected stop on the journey to Project Management maturity. We are such a young profession, still finding our way with Best Practices and organizational acceptance. It is an interesting discussion but I'm more interested in how we as a profession get the average PMO lifespan beyond ~3 years. Our concentration is on style/approach rather than acceptance/penetration.
Program Management | Project Management | Business Systems Improvement | Change Management
7 年Happy to have received book #187 and digging into the content now.
congrats Nichole Tubiolo, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSM !
? Coaching leaders & teams toward greater agility ?
7 年Congrats on the successful book John. Just FYI the PMBOK is a free download for all PMI members, so Amazon is only selling print and downloaded to non-PMI members — and while there are a couple treasures hidden in there, who is reading 500+ pages on a superset of tools to run any sort of one-time endeavor unless they absolutely must? Process groups and knowledge areas, while useful, do not good beach reading make.
Engineering Senior Project Manager | Certified Professional Coach
7 年PMI is updating PMBoK v6 to include Agile methodologies. I do not believe that Agile will not replace traditional project management all together, but it gives you another way to approach project management. For very large projects that are more strategic in nature or production oriented traditional project management is better. But for software development, Agile is an excellent way to determine requirements, develop user stories, priorize tasks, and use Scrum teams to work independently to execute the work. Agile does not have a PM role. When there are a mix of Agile and Traditional projects in a portfolio, some organiations use the PMs to keep the teams on track, interface with the customers, and report performance to plan. So the project management becomes a hybrid methodology between Agile and Traditional (e.g. Waterfall, Spiral, etc.) development. It is a matter of preference and not a clear cut choice to the approach of managing projects. I do know, having a PM or Agile team run projects drastically increases the success rate of projects to stay within scope, deliver on time, and within budget.