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.