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.

Totally forgot to mention…

I met 2 offices from the board of PMI Northern Italy, who are still raving about Sanjiv Augustine’s presentation there almost a year and a half ago. You can download it here

LIM continued into the second day of events with some real tidbits for the Agile community to take home.

Membership is not a compelling bargain
PMI’s Craig Killough shared with component leaders some compelling stats about PMI’s membership turnover. PMI loses about 25% of its members and credential holders every year. Even if a member is able to get certified, they often lose interest in membership, and decline to renew. PMI’s solution: transform from a transactional relationship to an experiential relationship. I totally agree with this. One of the most compelling TED videos I’ve seen regarding the modern market echoes the same sentiment.

Unfortunately, the only thing that I understand PMI to have done in that direction is to reorg HQ staff from product teams to market teams. Instead, the rest of the talk focused on some marketing tools components can use.

Talking about Local Interest Groups
One of the key strategies for the success of any professional community is at the local level. People need to meet face-to-face at high-value events in order move a mission forward (see Agile Principle #6). Over the past few years, PMI has started to see Local Interest Groups (LIGs), pop into existance. The initial leader of this phenomenon was the ISSIG, but others have started joining in.

Doing some Agile Business
I got a chance to talk with John Gorman, President of the Houston Chapter about the growth of the Houston APLN chapter. PMI Houston has been providing meeting space for the APLN Houston monthly meetings on a gratis basis. The co-value was to increase awareness of Agile within the PMI chapter, and to promote more foot traffic at the PMI chapter. John is telling me that Agile meeting has grown to 60+ people, and that they’re running out of space. Some on his board have been wanting to assimilate the APLN Chapter into a PMI Chapter sub-group, as was discussed at the previous session on LIGs. However, John and I came to agreement that’s not helpful to either side. Instead, the PMI chapter should find ways to leverage this new foot traffic by offering membership discounts. We wondered if any Agile LIGs would every really be necessary, if local APLN/Scrum/Agile groups are already in place all over the world.

After that converstation, I met with the Brantlee Underhill (business sponsor of the Agile CoP), Dan Tuten (our component mentor), and Frank Scattini (VP of PMI’s IT) [Correction, "Frank Schettini". Apparently I need to read business cards when transcribing their names]. I conveyed to them what we consider to be the key technology risks for our community:

• Allow me to offer unauthenticated content features – First doomsday scenario: we launch on June 30, and tens of thousands of Agilists go to the website, encounter a pay-for-registration page, without seeing ANY content, deduce that PMI is just out for their money, and then leave never to return. and leave never to return.
• Allow me more customizing of the home page - Second doomsday scenario: PMI members logon to the site as part of their membership dues already paid, find a site that has limited features and content, deduce that this is all there ever will be, and then leave never to return.
• Allow me more flexibility in wiki creation - Third doomsday scenario: existing high-energy volunteers have much success with uploading content to the current unofficial website ( http://agile-pm.pmwiki.com ), get frustrated by the limited wiki features on the official site, and then leave never to return.

We all agreed that everything can’t be done in 6 weeks, and that PMI Agile will likely be running in a dual website situation for a while. It was explained that the Government SIG and Consulting SIG have the same dual website problem with their VCP launches, so I’ll be sure to hunt them down for tips.

Q&A with Board and Executives
To close out the day, PMI’s Board of Directors, CEO, and COO assembled on the stage for a lengthy roundtable session. Some of the questions were banal, but others were pointed and yielded some fascintating insights into the mentality of PMI’s top brass. A more complete transcript is available on our twitter feed, but some really good nuggets bear highlighting:

“Membership is suffering 4% unemployment. If you’re one of them, they’ll waive your dues”

“Yes, PMPs have been stripped of their certification for violating code of ethics. Exactly how many is confidential.”

“Our values need to transform our work”

“Regarding the Scrum Alliance we have the same goals: tailored process to fit the project”

In the end, it sounds like PMI wants very much to be a values-driven organization, which is very much in line with Agile thinking. Perhaps the real challenge is how to ensure those values are elucidated across a 600,000+ constituent organization.

Yesterday was the first day of what has been affectionately called “PMI Bureaucracy Training”. But really, I’ve already gotten more than my money’s worth. I came to this PMI Leadership Institute Meeting (LIM) in Amsterdam as a representative of the PMI Agile Community. The stated purpose was to get better acquainted with the inner workings of PMI, so that our scheduled end-of-June launch would be as successful as possible.

Opening Sessions:
The LIM opened with the obligatory welcoming remarks from PMI’s Chair Ricardo Vargas and CEO Greg Ballestrero. But there were some compelling quotes in what they said.

“There is no space [in today's market] for weak [project] leadership”

“everyone [in PMI] aims to the same [goal]…to increase value”

“the smallest PMI chapters in the world today (e.g. Poland) are leading innovations like branches”

“Peru is fastest growing country in world. 60-70% GDP is small business; Agile is even more relevant there.”

Those are just a few of the comments that had Agile overtones. There are even more nuggets at the PMI Agile Twitter feed. The next session was the keynote by Creativity guru Fredrik Haren. His key thrust was that in a global market, Developing countries have a competative advantage over Developed countries. His analysis and concepts dovetail very much with what I’ve recently read in Gladwel’s Outliers and Godin’s Tribes.

Among the points:

1. “developing” countries first advantage, they see more change in their own environments
2. “developing” countries next advantage, domestic knowledge + imported knowledge = more knowledge
3. “developing” countries are the world’s best at copying existing ideas, which is the precursor to innovative combinations of those ideas

Core Values
Also fascinating was the announcement that PMI’s HQ is performing an initiative to codify its core values. PMI COO Mark Langley is leading a team of staffers and board members to discover what it is that PMI truly stands for. It’s a work in progress, but the current working set of core values are: Professionalism, Knowledge, Community & Volunteerism, Value of PM to Business. . However, as soon as they were revealed the team called out the key remaining issue: What does these values really mean? How do we define them, rather than relying on the varied perceptions and connotations they elicit. To address that, all the PMI leaders in attendance were asked to fill out a handout with these three questions:

• “why do you choose to volunteer for PMI”,
• “How would you describe what PMI represents?”
• “What does belonging to the PMI community mean to you.”

I’ll be very interested to hear how you all would answer those questions. We’ll be watching what comes out of this exercise.

Networking.
So far, this was the real value for me as a community representative. I met several other SIG leaders who are also struggling to deliver community value during the Virtual Community launch/transition. I was able to thank PMI Houston’s Vice Chair for their support of APLN Houston, and we threw around the idea of a Houston Agile Local Interest Group/Branch to futher that collaboration. I was also introduced to PMI’s Managing Director of PMI’s India office, who explained to me that PMI hosts local Congresses in India and China, to serve those markets more directly than does the PMI Global Congress Asia Pacific. Dave Prior and I also went over to thank PMI Chairman Ricardo Vargas for his amazing keynote at last week’s Scrum Gathering Brazil (that will require a dedicated blog article).

Most compelling though was a heart-to-heart with a high level PMI official who was willing to lay out the bare truth. I asked questionss about how much autonomy a PMI Agile community would have and was told that “PMI prefers to be hands off”. Really? “PMI has been Big Brother over the past several years, but no longer wants to be Big Brother”. When I countered with the perception of the assimilation of all the SIGs into the VCP umbrella, the official explained “there are those within PMI who are very used to a tight control of IP, policies, and marketing. There are others who understand that to be competitive and responsive to a changing market we need to let go of some things. A lot of what you are seeing is the tension that comes from finding that balance.” As candid as the converstation was, it synched up with what was said elsewhere. Community advisor Dan Tuten said during a breakout that a PMI communities policies and procedures need only comply with the code of ethics. During conversations at the evening reception, Ricardo Vargas was passionate about PMI embracing social media as a way to deliver value in a relevant way. In a similar chat, Ballestrero was quite intolerant of a PMI management approach that was overly disciplined as to get in the way of adapting to the market.

All in all a very compelling first day. Now I’m off to the first session of day 2.