Projects are a tricky thing. No matter how much you plan, or how adaptable and agile you are, something will always go wrong. Any project manager who states that they have never had a failed project is young, confused or going for a job interview.

Consider for a moment, your management style. Dr W. Edwards Deming, put forward two types of mistakes that you, as a manager can make when dealing with "variation" in process and outcomes. Interfering or tampering when everything is normal or within tolerance (common causes), indicative of micromanagement, and a failure to intervene when a process in out of control (special causes), indicative of absenteeism. As an Agile Manager, you need to find the middle ground between these two extremes.

I had a great time attending and speaking at AgileDC (http://agiledc.org/) earlier this week. I found the presentations to be interesting and educational and the people very friendly. This is just a quick write-up of some of those presentations that I attended.

Adaptive Leadership: Accelerating Enterprise Agility - Jim Highsmith (http://agiledc.org/presentation/keynote-adaptive-leadership-accelerating...)

I feel that there is a capability gap in the suite of methods making up the formal Agile methodologies. Specifically a programme management method to govern large organisational change programmes and the related projects that support them. Let's call this concept Agile Programme Management or APM (I never said I was good with names).

While there are many popular processes for personal productivity, GTD & Inbox Zero (http://inboxzero.com/) immediately spring to mind, neither of these scales well to manage team or project productivity. Part of the Agile toolbox, Kanban is a workflow & workload management method to improve the productivity of individuals (sometimes called personal Kanban), teams and projects. At its core, Kanban provides Just In Time (JIT) visualisation, scheduling & control mechanisms to track tasks through their lifecycle.