This week I’ve come to appreciate the simplicity of dedicated colocated teams. The cross-fuctional project i’m managing has team members distributed across 5 floors. Of course, each team is working on more than one project, all of which require multple meetings in a given week. What this means is the time-honored best practice of Management By Walking Around is just impossible. By the time I get to one team lead’s cube, they’ve been sucked into another meeting via their blackberry.

In a large IT matrix organization, the temptation is to optimize around funtional teams: the DB team, the GUI team, the mainframe team, etc. The teams all sit together, working on tasks organized around a specific functional knowledge, rather than the projects they work on. Of course, each functional team is working on several projects at once. As a result, I am exhausted trying to walk around getting questions answered. I’m beginning to appreciate the temptation to resort to “manage by email”…it’s just too hard to track everyone down face to face. So until I can convince the world at large to optimize around project teams, I have to utilize the secret weapon of large organizations: schedule a meeting of my own.

I have now scheduled one-on-one coffee breaks with each of my team leads, so that I can get an informal status from them well before the official weekly status meeting. In contrast, when I’ve worked on colocated Agile project teams, a quick sidebar gets me the answers I need in real-time. No hunting down people; No scheduling a conversation; just question-anwser. It also has the side-effect of updating the other team members with the same info.

Alas, in matrixed project organizations, you must journey vast and far to find your project members. So here I am, resorting to meetings to overcome everyone else’s meetings. It feels like schoolyard tactics: retaliating with the blunt instrument that I’m being clobbered with.

Michael Griffiths and I have talked to many of you recently about forming a PMI SIG dedicated to Agile Project Management. From what I’ve seen, there is a huge gap between the PMI and Agile communities, often tainted with stereotypes and even disdain. Chartering an Agile SIG within PMI will be a huge step forward in growing the penetration of human best practices into the larger PM community. Anyway, and I wanted to give you all an update, and a chance to participate.

Last week, I talked to Danielle Ritter at PMI about the topic. She informed me that PMI has frozen the creation of any new SIGs until the completion of its Virtual Communities Project (VCP) late this year. An offshoot of the larger Communities Transformation Project, VCP is revamping the way PMI does “communities”, by analyzing organizational models, processes and infrastructure needs for communities across the board. When all is said and done, some of today’s PMI colleges and SIGs will be re-chartered and renamed, while others will continue as-is.

Until then, she is taking requests from PMI members for communities that would address a specific area. Currently there are some 32 requests. Once the VCP project has completed, PMI will evaluate nominated communities be evaluated by an internal PMI group for interest, relevance, business value, and ability to move forward. Those passing this first filter, will be asked to participate in developing a business model.

So, we need to mobilize a critical mass of noisy, interested PMPs. I need you to spread the word: the squeaky wheel will get his SIG. Specifically, have people contact Danielle Ritter (communityformation@pmi.org), and tell her we want an Agile SIG/community. Here is a flyer that you can hand out at local/global APLN, Alliance, and PMI meetings. I plan on handing out dozens of these at the APLN summit in October. The flyer also contains talking points to help you and your colleagues articulate the potential of a PMI Agile community.

Thanks so much for your interest. Let’s go out there and build some buzz!!