This morning at the National Press Building, the Washington DC chapter of PMI hosted a talk entitled “Agile or PMBOK? You can have both”. The presenter was David Sides from ESI, who has been using Agile at his client engagements for a while, and shared his observations light-hearted fashion (more on that in moment).

The event was sold out, with more than 100 DC-area professionals coming to check out the talk. When David asked how many were using Agile, only 2 raised their hands (including me). When he asked how many were looking into / thinking about using it, a full 40% raised their hands. Clearly, this was a topic that had significant draw.

So with that backdrop, Dave went about debunking some Agile myths, and making some interesting points. Here are the highlights:

• “There’s no such thing as pure methodology” – His point here is that all Agile projects have a dose of reality tempering the ideal process. Indeed, even waterfall projects use iterative/incremental process to knock out bugs during a test cycle.
• “Will Agile get you working software faster? Yes. Will Agile get your product to market faster? Maybe.” Getting to market depends on more than just working software. Packaging, marketing, sales prep, training, need to be considered.
• J.E.D. = Just Enough Documentation
• >”Too often we don’t have enough SMEs. Instead we get SMRs (subject matter rookies)”
• “How many of us have been on ’stereo concalls’…where half the participants are in the cubes next to us?”
• “Some cultures never change.” Even those that do need a “constant iterative change process to get where we can use Agile”.
• Move away from “Earned Value” to “Achieved Value”

He also had fun doing his Letterman routine: 10 stupid Agile tricks (e.g. “We in IT know what is best”). David did a good job, and he’ll be reprising the talk as a webinar tomorrow: http://request.esi-intl.com/forms/EV09JUN11FM-PM-AgileWebinar

At the end of the talk, he took questions from the crowd:

• But what about regression testing?
• But what about fixed-price?
• But what about Agile teams that need a full iteration to finish testing?
• But what about matrixed teams? My organization would never give dedicated staff

What suprised me about this event, was not that Agile newcomers were asking the same questions. Instead, my eyes were opened to the uncharted ocean of opportunity that exists in the market. So many projects are struggling with the same issues. So many PMs are tasked with the impossible. Agile offers a management approach that can solve those problems, but people are not getting the message.

This is why I volunteer with PMI’s Agile Community of Practice. The market needs a place for dyed-in-the-wool PMs to go for their first exposure to Agile PM. A place where people can have these basic questions can be answered, and then get directed to a local user group and local training. This kind of resource could the beginning of a journey of growth and expertise that could transform our workplace from a dungeon to a dynamo.

Day two of the Congress offered a couple sessions and some great networking.

“The Best Agile Session of The Conference”
That was the quote from Jim Cundiff of the Scrum Alliance in reference to the final Agile session “Challenges in Implementing Agile Project Management”. This session was a roundtable discussion put together by Bob Tarne, VP of PR for PMI’s IT&Telecom SIG. The panelists included myself, Juliet Andrew from EMC/Conchango, Dave Prior also from PMI’s IT&Telecom SIG, and Matthias Petren who is the Chair of PMI South Sweden Branch.

Simply put, we had a blast. Given that we had already shared a couple beers together two nights before, there was a comfort level with agreeing and disagreeing on certain points. Also, these panelists were pretty knowledgeable about Agile PM. Juliet has presented the day before during the Pecha Kucha seminar; Dave and Bob serve with me on PMI’s Agile Community of Practice, and Matthias helps organize OreDev the premier technology conference in Europe. Some of the best quotes include:

• The Project Manager does not get laid off when going to Agile. The role gets forked into an upwardly-focused Product Owner and a team-focused ScrumMaster / Team Facilitator. – Juliet
• One speaker here reminded us of Newton’s law that Work = Force x Distance. Agile seeks to minimize the waste involved in communicating and executing over long distances via colocation. – Mattias Petren
• “You can start becoming Agile tomorrow by exercising a ruthless commitment to deliver value earlier and more often”.
• “We are trained in MBA / PMP classes that you execute most effeciently by delivering in functional layers. Today’s market will no longer wait for you to deliver that way. We need to transform to delivering in vertical slices.”
• “Agile aligns with what PMI’s CEO Greg Ballestrero is saying these days: We need to move away from focusing on performance-to-plan to value-delivery”
• “I had a very bad experience with XP, so I was a very reluctant Agilist. Success came when I learned that you can’t pick and choose the Agile values you support. You can tailor your practices, but you have to be all-in with the values”

Bob and Dave get a lot of credit for making this session happen. There was extra work to finalize the proposal and some of the panelists had to fill in at the last minute for some cancelations. Other summaries of the session were blogged by Bob and by Dave. summary here. In addition, the IT&Telecom SIG video recorded the session, so we hope to broadcast it soon.

Agile Offshoring
Pedro Sarrador gave a talk entitled “Managing Offshore Projects: Globalization Is Here: Are You Ready For It?”. In short, Offshoring is hard. He gave some good points about managing your own expectations regarding the productivity of offshore teams. Also, the offshore project infrastructure will be setup before you start the project itself. He described the Ambassador pattern without calling it as such, and also called out the need for a strong Onshore team to be in place to support the Offshore team.

However, most intriguing was his description of incorporating Agile techniques into his traditionally-managed project. He said that timeboxes, big visible communications, test automation were critical to improving a bumpy Phase 1 to a successful Phase 2. There is a growing body of work on Agile offshoring, and I’d like to see Pedro’s successes get incorporated into that discussion.

Networking
IT&Telecom SIG allowed me to interview Jim Cundiff, Managing Director of the Scrum Alliance. I asked him why on Earth the Scrum Alliance was here at a PMI conference. He responded by saying he was here at the invitation of PMI’s CEO Greg Ballestrero. On the interview, Jim explained the growing interest in Agile PM within PMI’s membership. The recent Scrum Gathering keynotes by PMI’s CEO and PMI’s Chairman of the Board of Directors is a way for them to explore Agile PM. It turns out that PMI was so impressed with their experience at the Scrum Gathering, they are talking to Jim about having an Agile luminary do a keynote at the PMI Global Congress North America in Orlando in October. More on that will be posted as details emerge.

Social Media and PM
On the third and final day, I got to hear Bas De Baar of projectshrink.com talk about “Everything a Project Manager Should Know About Social Media”. Other Social Media PMs were in attendance (Dave Prior and Bob Tarne), so it made for a fun dialog. To my utter delight, I found a WiFi signal in the room, and startied Twittering key nuggets from this presentation about Twitter and its sibling technologies.

Among my favorite points that I tweeted were:

• @projectshrink: on your blog, allow users to attach a photo to their comments #pmi #pmot
• @projectshrink telling cautionary tales about social media: http://ow.ly/80n8 and http://ow.ly/80nP #pmi #pmot
• @projectshrink giving examples of social media for PM: Use a wiki to manage a living requirements backlog #pmi #pmot
• @projectshrink recommending the social media book “Groundswell” #pmi #pmot http://ow.ly/80iO
• @projectshrink: “don’t drink and blog at the same time” #pmi #pmot

These two days gave me some really good insights into PM trends. My next step is to ruminate a little bit about the key takeaways, which I will be posting later in the week.

Day 1 at the PMI Global Congress at Amsterdam came off to a bumpy start. After 3 days of varying degrees of value at the PMI Leadership Institute Meeting, I was ready for a real dynamic conference experience.

Logistical Snafus
However, I learned rather quickly that WiFi was limited to 3 isolated hotspot. This meant that I really couldn’t Twitter the days events as they were happening. Furthermore, the A/V setup experienced problems at the opening session, the keynote, and the third slot. We had almost finished the first day before the staff seemed to have gotten the conference running smoothly.

Pecha Kucha Meets Agile
Matthias Petren of the Agile-minded Swedish firm LeadWay emceed the conference’s opening session, which happened to be a plenary session for Agile Project Management. The topic was done in Pecha Kucha presentation format, where speakers present 20 slides, using 20 seconds each for a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds to get your point across. Think of it as “Lean Thinking for Presentations”. I’ve included an example for you below:

First up was Juliet Andrew from EMC/Conchango talking about “The History of the Agile Development. Second was Gabrielle Benefield who helped introduce Agile to Yahoo. She talked about “Agile Roles”, comparing Scrums 3 roles to RUP’s 27 roles. Next up was Petri Haapio of Reaktor Innovations, talking about “Agile in the enterprise.” where he addressed several misconceptions about Agile in a traditional organization. Finally, we had Bjorn Granvik, CTO of Jayway, a sister company to LeadWay, where he talked about Shock Therapy, which he said boosted productivity 250% for one of his teams and 400% for another.

After this blitz of four 7-minute presentations, the group then went into 4 breakout sessions, facilitated by each of the speakers. The breakouts were conducted in an Open Space format, and I ended up in a conversation about “when to do Agile”. There were 5 of us who realized that managers are often called upon to prevent a team’s failure. If they were to pull back, you’d experience some failure, and hear lots of excuses. However, we’ve all heard these excuses before, regardless of project setting:

• I’m too busy with too many projects: Agile emphasizes fully dedicated resources
• No answers to my questions: Agile emphasizes colocating a customer expert or representative with the team.
• The part that failed is not my job: Agile emphasizes team-based responsibility and commitment
• I had no idea we were in trouble: Agile emphasizes metrics around work-remaining vs. time-remaining, as well as daily standup meetings to surface issues
• That might be what I asked for, but it’s not what I need: Agile emphasizes a customer-commitment to short-term scope, with customer-flexibility on long-term scope.

It occurred to me that Agile provides (1) an accountability mechanism for surfacing excuses we already know and (2) a suite of best practices (e.g. Face to face communication) for addressing those excuses directly to improve performance. The PMs in the conversation really wished they could have thage degree of accountability and transparancy on their projects. They left in deep contemplation, thinking “maybe I really can use Agile on my project”.

Agile Part 2
After a mediocre keynote, the conference tracks started, including a session by Nathalie Udo and Sonja Koppensteiner for “An Agile Guide to the PMBOK Planning Processes”. Things got dicey when the presenters had to start without a projector. Later on, the lapel mic started buzzing, and the lights went out in half the room. One person cried out “I can’t hear what you’re saying, this is unacceptable”, and seemed ready to storm off to demand a refund.

Nevertheless, the Agile sessions made the most of the circumstances. After an intro to Agile, the ladies had the room breakoff into teams to do an exercise in iteration planning. My group of 4 was stumped by the assignment. “We have a backlog with priorities and estimates; what planning is left to do?” I tried to point them to potential risks/tasks/resources associated with the theoretical project to install solar panels, but to no avail. After 20 minutes of haggling over what we were to do, we were summoned back to the room to debrief our findings.

It turns out, we were the only ones to make zero progress. One team brainstormed the new feature of adjustable panels. Two teams drew a mockup. Another team realized the planning exercise was too big for the alloted time, so they split up to 3 sub teams for risks, tasks, and roles. Another team produced more concreate questions about priorities: “what if you have to cut down trees to get to sunlight?”. All the other teams made progress with their iteration planning, but my team was not able to get anwhere. Because of that experience, I realized that even within PMI, different teams have different tolerances for ambiguity. I may have been placed with a team wanting more details before doing anything. Other teams just blazed forward. Perhaps this is why some Agile teams demand Iteration 0, while others decry it as waste.

During Q&A, one attendee raised a very provacative question: “Aren’t you less Agile as you move further along into a project, because you learn most of what you need to know? Isn’t it then that you transition to be more lean, because you don’t need as much investment/waste as you did when you got started?” When the two Agile presenters admitted to being stumped by the question, the audience chuckled seemingly unaware of the Agile vs. Lean debates popping up on message boards recently.

Agile part 3
Nils Akervall and Arne Linder gave a session entitled “Applying Project Management Models for Agile Development”. Unlike the previous sessions, which were more interactive, this topic was straight lecture. Nils gave a 45-minute intro to Scrum, and Arne explained how he adapted an enterprise governance approach to his Agile teams. The content was okay, but it was hard to stay tuned in to a lecture format after such a long day. During the Q&A, they did make two comments that didn’t align with other speakers:

• “Yes, Agile is primarily focused on IT” – Sonja and Nathalie referenced Lean Thinking as an example of Agile principles being extensible outside of IT.
• “Yes, we may have oversimplified when saying you don’t need an architecture phase/team” – Julie mentioned the ‘tracer bullet’ technique that builds out a single feature to test each architecture layer, without building out each layer completely.

Whew, a long day of Agile stuff, and I actually learned a few things. Tomorrow promises even more.

Day 3 was a mix of the mediocre and the amazing.

Outreach, Knowledge, and Maturity.
There was one session about chapter outreach, where I met some really interesting people. The chairs of the Swiss and Frankfurt chapter were at my table, sharing some of their tips for things like mediating conflicts between local vendors and Universitys. They made up for an otherwise yawner of a session.

Then, I ended up at a “Knowledge Delivery” session, hosted by Brantlee Underhill (the Agile CoP’s business sponsor). She was talking about how the Virtual Community Project will facilitate more knowledge across the PMI. There was a lot of concern from PMI component officers about how they could accomplish their mission, once they were assimilated into PMI proper. After some debate, we agreed that service delivery is simply a logistical hurdle. However, we all raised the need to emphasize to PMI that a group needs a group identity (aka brand), specifically within virtual communities (e.g. logo & colors). One PMI volunteer leader suggesting we rethink knowledge copyright the way TED.com does with its online videos. An American volunteer suggests all PMI leaders go to an event in another countries. “I learn so much more than just another US event”. All very important input for PMI to consider when converting its SIGs into the new virtual communty model. This session was more interesting, because the PMI Agile Community is chartered as a virtual community, and I got some good dialog around how to make that successful.

Finally, there was a session hosted by Martin Price of the PMI UK Chapter. He was by far the most valuable speaker, taking us on a journey of some key maturity patterns, which mirrorred Alistair Cockburn’s SHU-HA-RI pattern. He cited A key nugget was “PMI Components manage projects”, reminding us that PMI should eat its own dog food, as it were. At the end, he asked every to fill out a self-assessment form regarding your community’s collaborative maturity. It very much had the feel of the bioteams model popularized by Dan Mezick

Retrospective, PMI style
The final session invited a few people to express their key learnings from the event. One said “I’m tired and inspired”, while others said something or other about networking being good. The South Sweden chair expressed an actionable goal to pass along to his local chapters some names of potential speakers. When I was handed the mic, I shared the illumination that I’m not alone struggling with component problems. As a newcomer to leading a PMI community, I had assumed that my problems were isolated to newcomers, that more senior chapter presidents and SIG chairs would have already skated well beyond our issues. As it turns out, some of the problems are common to the most mature of those communties (like running two community website in parrallel).

Introductions over drinks and final thougths
After some dinner, I went to a reception hosted by the PMO SIG, promoting its symposium in November. I got to talk extensively with Emad Aziz from the Middle East / North Africa chapter, who is putting together an impressive PM conference in Cairo. I also met with Raj Kalady, the Managing Director of PMI’s office in Mumbai. So in the end, the LIM chapter provided mediocre sessions, but amazing networking opportunties. If I could convince the organizers to offer at least 1 Open Space session, the value offered would go through the roof. Finally, late in the evening, the Agilists participating in the Congress showed up and introduced each other over some appetizers and drinks. There will be over 10 Agilists featured at 4 sessions during the Congress starting tommorrw. Jim Cundiff of the Scrum Alliance is among them, and has come to observe the proceedings. LIM was good for building relationships, but the Agile events at the Congress promise to change people’s lives.