Are you looking for an effective guide to learn and apply agile project management? Then Keep reading...

Like it or not, good project management doesn't just happen - just like excellent athletes and their coaches don't just happen.

Good project management is a cumulus of factors that influence the outcome of a project. On the one hand, you need a team dedicated to working within deadlines and within the quality and functionality specifications of the client.

On the other hand, you need a sturdy person who can actually overlook the development of the entire project - a project manager, that is. More often than not, people believe a project manager is some sort of spreadsheet juggler - a miraculous person capable of reading minds, motivating people (including themselves), and enabling intriguing functions in Excel.

Sure, those might all be requirements of a good project manager - and yes, we're pretty serious about the mind-reading quality (not so much in a paranormal sense, but in the sense of being capable to communicate beyond words).

Beyond all this, though, excellent project managers have the experience, the knowledge, and the constant thirst for doing better that pushes them to learn and relearn their craft over and over again, with every project, with every team structure, with every company they work for.

Good project managers constantly search for the very best methods to make things happen, to make them happen in time, and to make them happen well.

This is precisely why there are so many project management methods - and while agile itself has become, as you will see later on in this book, an umbrella term for a myriad of frameworks and every combination they can make.

What Is a Project?

The question itself might sound silly, but the truth is that you can't do proper project management without defining the very object of your work: the project.

In simple terms, a project is a series of activities meant to achieve a specific goal. The goal might be something pretty large, like a brand new, innovative software application. Or it might be something internal, like boosting the engagement among the employees. And it might as well be something more granular, such as a Black Friday marketing campaign in an eCommerce store.

This book covers the following topics:

...And much more

If you have a goal and if your goal requires more than a couple of steps to be reached, you are most likely not facing a task or even a series of tasks, but a project.