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.
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