Last week’s Agile 2009 conference featured a milestone in the project management profession: the formal launch of the PMI Agile community. Agile practioners believe that project managers across the world will benefit from a broader toolset and new ways of leadership thinking, and PMI agrees. We could think of no better way to commemorate the launch than to celebrate with fellow Agilists at the premier annual conference dedicated to Agile practices. The celebration included a number of activities, which I have capture below. It’s a long read, but there’s a lot that happened.
Fresher’s Faire
The first night of the conference featured an ice breaker, where attendees could mingle over some games and learn about certain affinity groups. We setup a flip chart and handed out PMI buttons that people could wear “to show their support of Agile’s infiltration into PMI”. Several people came up and said “I’m an Agile practioner and a PMP”. One from Brazil, one from Poland, one from Toronto, one from Calgary. Even PMI skeptic Tobias Mayer stopped by and complimented me on my flipchart…and let me tell you, Tobias doesn’t impress easy.
But the most compelling person to come to our flipchart was Regina Muller of the Agile Lawyer’s Association! Agile Lawyers?! That’s exactly what Dr. David Frame called for in a recent panel discussion on government procurement reform. Regina had lots to say about using Agile techniques to manage a case portfolio; she was even able to get Alistair Cockburn’s attention.
PMI Sessions
The PMI community organized two sessions at the conference:
- “What is an Agile Project Manager Anyway” – This was a 90 minute workshop that started with a brief 10 minute talk by Pat Reed, where she laid out the new expectations placed upon a Project Manager that wants to become more agile-minded. After that, we broke out into 20 table discussions, each facilitated by an Agile PM expert. The fact that over 200 people came tells me, that people had a stuff to work through. Some wanted to know why titles mattered so much. Others wanted to know why the Agile community blamed them for broader organizational dysfunction. Still others were former project managers, who believed strongly the PM career path got in the way of really serving their team. At the end of the session, the facilitators shared their key nuggets, many of which were contradictory:
- “Agile is structured and disciplined, so you don’t need a PM to control that anymore”
- “An agile PM has undergone the mental shift from a commanding ‘I know best’ to an adaptive listening”
- “You primary compentency becomes empathy”
- “Decouple the project role from pay/grade/careerpath/title”
- “The agile PM’s success criteria moves from on-shedule/on-budget to customer adoption and satsifaction”
- “Growing PMI Using Agile”- This was the story of how our community used iterative/incremental techniques to deliver a functioning volunteer organization, which is a non-IT project. You can download the presentation here. Turnout was mild, but I won’t complain because Jim Highsmith came to my session, and even playfully heckled one of my ancedotes.
Jim Highsmith Goes On Record
Speaking of Jim, he made quite the statement last Tuesday night at the big event. Thoughtworks held a reception at its headquarters next door to the conference. The event was themed as an “agile festival”, but featured the PMI Agile community as an honored guest. After Martin Fowler welcomed the 236 people that showed up, he gave the floor to agile co-founder Jim Highsmith, who gave the following key points:
- Recognition – The formation of an official Agile organization with PMI, along with a pro-Agile position statement from SEI represent industry recognition of the effectiveness of the Agile approach to running projects.
- Practices – Traditional project management is not evil; it’s simply limited. Traditional practices can scale very large, but are only effective in scenarios where all the constraints and dimensions are fixed and known. Agile has achieved much success on complex projects, but is only beginning to scale to the size of mega-projects. When you run into projects both complex and large projects, you need to blend your practices. He’s currently coaching an Agile project in China that has 40,000 people working on it. You can’t use conventional Agile for that.
- Roles – Jim says “There are some people who think there is no role for a project manager on an agile project [pause for effect] I’m not one of those people”. He went on to say that “Project Management is a strategic business capability”, that PMs are often needed to translate project elements into higher-level organizational perspective that executives expect.
- Reconceiving – He also asserted that this evolving perspective on project managers and agile project management is “Reconceiving, not comprimising”. Comprimising involves a win-lose attitude, but reconceiving strives for the win-win.
They were powerful words.
Former APLN and Agile Alliance board member Mike Griffiths followed with his story about how the launch of the PMI Agile community is the culmination of a personal journey. He talk about his multi-year efforts to influence more agile content in the PMBOK and more agile sessions at PMI conferences. I closed the welcome with a call to action to the agilists in the room, by saying “PMI is listening”. I cited the fact that PMI’s VP of Technology, Frank Schettini, was at the reception to talk about how he’s rolling out Scrum across his IT organization, and is seeing real benefit from it. As a result of all this, several people came up to us afterwards and offered to help with the mission.
PMI’s Support Is Very Real
As SIGs transition to the new Virtual Community model, many volunteer leaders have concerns about the what kind of support they can expect from PMI. Well, let me tell you PMI really came through for us leading into this event:
- PMI formatted, printed, and shipped both the brochure and the banner that we as a team designed.
- PMI shipped business cards and polo shirts to the conference so that we could convey a professional presence
- PMI sent one of the community’s executive sponsors, Frank Schettini, to support our efforts to raise awareness
In the end, if there was something we needed, and it was within the standard constraints and requirements given to all the virtual communities, PMI was will to deliver. Even if you disagree with some of PMI’s operational policies, you can’t say the staffers aren’t willing to help with your mission to promote project success.
Face To Face Meetings
One of the most personally rewarding experiences was to have some face-to-face time with the PMI Agile community’s Leadership Council. We’ve been working so long over phone / email / skype, we were very much looking forward toasting each other in person. Considering all that was accomplished, I can assert this is most productive team I’ve ever worked with. Thanks to all of you guys:
- Sanjiv Augustine
- Rodney Bodamer
- Brian Bozzuto
- Mike Cottmeyer
- Mike Griffiths
- Jean Laporte
- Dan Mezick
- Ainsley Nies
- Dave Prior
- Pat Reed
- George Schlitz
- Michele Sliger
- Bob Tarne
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks Jesse,
I liked your briefing about Agile09 and PMI, very interesting, your sharing made me feel the presence there.
Go PMI Agilists
I wore one of your PMI buttons too, for the whole evening
and for that Tobias, I am eternally grateful.
Jesse well done. From a small burning vision to fully recognized implementation, excellent!