To all PMI Agilists, it is official !

At last week’s PMI Global Congress in Denver, PMI’s Virtual Communities Project (VCP) announced their intent to launch an Agile community as the next new specific interest component. This is an exciting culmination of all our collected efforts. For over a year now, all of you have been expressing your enthusiasm to VCP and collaborating with local chapters on Agile practices. This combination of bottom-up and top-down engagement has gotten the attention of PMI leaders worldwide.

What exactly is this community going to be
Under the new component governance framework, VCP has defined two different tiers of specific interest communities: an entry-level “forum”, and a full-service “community of practice”. VCP is targeting Q2 of 2009 as the launch date for an Agile “forum” community. Once we have achieved that basic level of service to our members, we can then grow into the next tier (sounds rather close to iterative and incremental, wouldn’t you say?). For a more explanation of the VCP project, you can check out the latest issue of PMI Today here: http://www.pmitoday-digital.com/pmitoday/200810/ (note, you must first login to pmi.org before clicking the link)

What happens next?
Right now, our community steering committee is talking to VCP about what should go into a 2009 business plan. Once that plan begins to take shape, we’ll have a rather large backlog of requirements that need to be accomplished. So what we need now are volunteers to help build the community, and publicize its formation. Our most immediate need is to people to the SQE Agile Dev Practices conference in Orlando next month: http://www.sqe.com/go?ADP08APMI. PMI Agile has a booth there, and we need competent (that would be you) PMI members to volunteer an hour of their time to help spread the word. If you’re interested in helping in Orlando, or in any other facet, contact me directly at jesse.fewell@excella.com

Who were the real players in making this happen?
Finally, we have to do some recognition of those who have put us in this position:

• Mike Griffiths was the first to issue this challenge to us, and paved the way with his Agile lectures at SeminarsWorld.
• Dave Prior, Bob Tarne, and the IT&Telecom SIG have been collaborating with Jim Cundiff and the Scrum Alliance to raise Agile awareness within PMI.
• Michele Sliger and Stacia Broderick who, after co-writing a mapping of Agile processes to the PMBOK, then co-wrote a draft community plan that we submitted to VCP.
• Michele Sliger, Karen R.J. White, James Goebel, Bijan Nikravan, Douglas Melanson, and Peter Bennison who all spoke on Agile topics at last week’s Congress, providing ample validation that VCP’s support is well-founded.
• All of you, too numerous to mention by name, who emailed, blogged, petitioned, and preached that Agile can make a difference to the PMI community.

Let’s keep the ball rolling!

Texas is blazing forward on the PMI Agile front, with TWO cities showing about recent collaboration:

• In Houston last year, Alan Bustamante helped spread the buzz about PMI Agile at the PMI Houston Conference. Well, his efforts have yielded some fruit. He and Robbie Mac Iver have just launched a local APLN chapter (Congrats!), and partnered with PMI Houston as a sponsor of their events. With that sponsorship comes formal PDUs for attending the chapter meeting, as well as ongoing cross-pollination of chapter memberships.
• In Dallas, the local PMI chapter offered an educational seminar earlier this summer. They collaborated with Julie Chickering and the local APLN chapter to provide an Agile track. Not only was the track well received, but it serves as another example in the growing the collaboration between APLN and PMI at the grass-roots level.

Alan, Robbie, and Julie are all on our yahoo distribution, so send them a quick note of congratulations.