Top 50 Jim Highsmith Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you want to be fast and agile, keep things simple. Speed isn’t the result of simplicity, but simplicity enables speed.”

— Jim Highsmith

2. “The best way to get a project done faster is to start sooner.”

— Jim Highsmith

3. “Documentation is not understanding, process is not discipline, formality is not skill.”

— Jim Highsmith

4. “Agility is the ability to both create and respond to change in order to profit in a turbulent business environment.”

— Jim Highsmith

5. “Agility is principally about mindset, not practices.”

— Jim Highsmith

6. “Agility is the ability to balance flexibility and stability.”

— Jim Highsmith

7. “Agile Project Management is an execution-biased model, not a planning-and-control-biased model.”

— Jim Highsmith

8. “A team can employ agile practices, but it won’t achieve the potential benefit of agile development without embracing agile values and principles.”

— Jim Highsmith

9. “At the core of healthy team relationships is trust and respect.”

— Jim Highsmith

10. “The greatest risk we face in software development is that of overestimating our own knowledge.”

— Jim Highsmith

11. “If you want to innovate, you have to iterate!”

— Jim Highsmith

12. “Leaders who want to create adaptive, self-organizing teams steer rather than control – they influence, nudge, facilitate, teach, recommend, assist, urge, counsel, and, yes, direct in some instances.”

— Jim Highsmith

13. “Agility is more attitude than process, more environment than methodology.”

— Jim Highsmith

14. “Process is not a substitute for skill.”

— Jim Highsmith

15. “The Agile Project Management principles and framework encourage learning and adapting as an integral part of delivering value to customers.”

— Jim Highsmith

16. “In my early years of iterative development, I thought timeboxes were actually about time. What I came to realize is that timeboxes are actually about forcing tough decisions.”

— Jim Highsmith

17. “If you have unskilled people who work poorly together, no amount of process will save your projects.”

— Jim Highsmith

18. “Simple rules guide innovative, intelligent responses. Comprehensive rules guide rote, routine responses.”

— Jim Highsmith

19. “Agile project leaders help their team balance at the edge of chaos – some structure, but not too much; adequate documentation, but not too much; some up-front architecture work, but not too much. Finding these balance points is the “art” of agile leadership.”

— Jim Highsmith

20. “Self-discipline is also built on competence, persistence, and the willingness to assume accountability for results. Competence is more than skill and ability; it’s attitude and experience.”

— Jim Highsmith

21. “At any organizational level people are leaders not because of what they do, but because of who they are.”

— Jim Highsmith

22. “Dialogue, discussion, and participatory decision making are all part of building self-discipline.”

— Jim Highsmith

23. “The formula for success is simple: deliver today, adapt tomorrow.”

— Jim Highsmith

24. “Peel back the facade of rigorous methodology projects and ask why the project was successful, and the answer is people.”

— Jim Highsmith

25. “Traditional waterfall methods deliver value at the end of the project, often months or years after the project begins. Agile projects can deliver value quickly and incrementally during the life of the project. Capturing value early and often can significantly improve a project’s return on investment, and utilizing iterative, feature-based delivery is the cornerstone practice in making that happen.”

— Jim Highsmith

26. “The quality of results from any collaboration effort are driven by trust and respect.”

— Jim Highsmith

27. “In high-performance teams, “the leaders managed the principles, and the principles managed the team.”

— Jim Highsmith

28. “What is the difference between project management and project leadership? Although there is an elusive line between them, the core difference is that management deals with complexity, whereas leadership deals with change.”

— Jim Highsmith

29. “In an agile project the team takes care of the tasks and the project leader takes care of the team.”

— Jim Highsmith

30. “The iterative piece of agile can be defined by four key terms: iterative, feature-based, timeboxed, and incremental.”

— Jim Highsmith

31. “A methodology’s weight is a product of its size and ceremony.”

— Jim Highsmith

32. “Iterative development, when accompanied with reasonable end-of-iteration reviews – product, technical, process, team – is also self-correcting.”

— Jim Highsmith

33. “In a self-organized team, individuals take accountability for managing their own workload, shift work among themselves based on need and best fit, and take responsibility for team effectiveness. Team members have considerable leeway in how they deliver results, they are self-disciplined in their accountability for those results, and they work within a flexible framework.”

— Jim Highsmith

34. “The agile value “Delivering Value over Meeting Constraints” provides a focus for rethinking how we measure performance on projects.”

— Jim Highsmith

35. “In fact, in an agile project, technical excellence is measured by both capacity to deliver customer value today and create an adaptable product for tomorrow.”

— Jim Highsmith

36. “A traditional project manager focuses on following the plan with minimal changes, whereas an agile leader focuses on adapting successfully to inevitable changes.”

— Jim Highsmith

37. “The capability of self-organizing teams lies in collaboration. When two engineers scratch out a design on a whiteboard, they are collaborating. When team members meet to brainstorm a design, they are collaborating. When team leaders meet to decide whether a product is ready to ship, they are collaborating. The result of any collaboration can be categorized as a tangible deliverable, a decision, or shared knowledge.”

— Jim Highsmith

38. “When project leaders focus on delivery, they add value to projects. When they focus on planning and control, they tend to add overhead.”

— Jim Highsmith

39. “Project leaders must be champions of technical excellence; they must support and advocate technical excellence while maintaining a watchful eye on other project objectives.”

— Jim Highsmith

40. “APM’s core purpose of creating innovative new products and services means dealing with constant technological and competitive change, generating novel ideas, and continually reducing product development schedules.”

— Jim Highsmith

41. “If you find that your organization can’t make the hard decisions that Scrum demands, then high-risk, uncertain projects have very little probability of success in your organization.”

— Jim Highsmith

42. “If your goal is to deliver a product that meets a known and unchanging specification, then try a repeatable process. However, if your goal is to deliver a valuable product to a customer within some targeted boundaries, when change and deadlines are significant factors, then reliable Agile processes work better.”

— Jim Highsmith

43. “The agile value “Delivering Value over Meeting Constraints” provides a focus for rethinking how we measure performance on projects. Although constraints such as cost and time are important, they should be secondary to creating value for customers. All too often, we focus on what is easily measurable and ignore really important characteristics that are harder to quantify. Agile development attempts to change that bias and focus on the most important things, and value is at the top of that list.”

— Jim Highsmith

44. “Large portions of the productivity gains from agile methods come not from doing things better, but from not doing them at all.”

— Jim Highsmith

45. “The feature delivery approach helps define a workable interface between customers and product developers.”

— Jim Highsmith

46. “If we want to build great products, we need great people. If we want to attract and keep great people, we need great principles.”

— Jim Highsmith

47. “APM focuses on team management, from building self-organizing teams to developing a servant leadership style. It is both more difficult, and ultimately more rewarding than managing tasks.”

— Jim Highsmith

48. “There are three particularly important issues involved in delivering customer value: focusing on innovation rather than efficiency and optimization, concentrating on execution, and lean thinking.”

— Jim Highsmith

49. “Only experience can refine a leader’s art. High-uncertainty projects are full of anxiety, change, and ambiguity that the team must deal with. It takes a different style of project management, a different pattern of team operation, and a different type of project leader. I’ve labeled this type of management leadership-collaboration.”

— Jim Highsmith

50. “Get the right people involved, and self-discipline comes more easily. Get the wrong people, and imposed discipline creeps in, destroying trust and respect.”

— Jim Highsmith