Some believe that an overarching organizational and governance model to structure operations in agile environments is needed. An agile project management organization can act as an aggregator and evaluator of agile project data metrics to help leaders track performance for improved value delivery.

If you really want to get the benefit of Scrum, you have to make the mind shift to product ownership, not project management or project ownership. The product owner role is often thought of as being a requirements specifier, when in fact a good product owner is a value maximizer, and a great product owner is a product maximizer.

Agile emphasizes just-in-time requirements rather than upfront preparation. The requirements person—be it the product owner, business analyst, product manager, or someone else—embodies the understanding of what is needed, and the user story represents the work that needs doing. This article details what user stories are (and what they are not).

A good key indicator for measuring how well your agile team is performing is the burndown chart. It’s a simple concept—as time passes, the amount of work to do decreases. Of course, there will be days when progress is not as expected or tasks end up larger than originally estimated. A burndown can help your team reset and keep stakeholders in the loop.