Tag Archives: Conferences

Want Innovation? Be a Follower and a Borrower

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Over the last month, I’ve seen a series of events related to innovation that given me new levels of insight into how creative breakthroughs happen. This is the first of three posts explaining the events, and the mind-altering, myth-breaking, insights that have crystalized the way I look at innovation and execution.

A full four weeks ago, I saw Malcolm Gladwell keynote the PMI Global Congress in Dallas. Here was his opening point:

The paradox of innovative organizations is that they are followers and borrowers, not leaders and innovators

Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell offers provocative observations on innovation

He followed that point with an avalanche of examples:

  • During Bekaa air battle in 1982 (http://bit.ly/nee2Aa), Israel was the first to use drones, awax radar, and SAM missiles at the same time. These were technologies pioneered by the highly funded, innovation-oriented Soviets; then developed by the Americans with budget oversight and “get the job done” culture; finally utilized by a crisis-motivated Israel with no R&D budget at all. He found this example in the military innovation book by Adamsky
  • The mouse and the Graphical User Interface (GUI) were developed at the storied Xeroc Parc project in Palo Alto. Steve Jobs famously took that GUI and did what Xerox could not do: launch a commercial product with the technology (i.e. the Mac). It was a beautiful product and business success. But it was Microsoft who modified the technology into Windows, the most commercially successful operating system of all time.
  • Friendster is the one that lays claim to the first pure-play social media pioneer. MySpace matured Friendster’s breakthrough idea, and sold out to News Corp for a half-billion dollars. Now we all talk about Facebook as the king of social media and its multi-billion dollar valuation.

Here is the myth-breaker: being first to market with a fresh new idea, does NOT correlate to success.

Malcolm Gladwell presents at PMI Global Congress

Zen-PM takes a snapshot of Malcolm Gladwell's innovation talk at PMI Global Congress

The pattern is that innovation is carried out by three successive parties:

  • First, The Inventors, who typify the innovative culture with big investments, and pioneer a new product, technology, or service.
  • Then, The Implementors, who have less to invest, and focus on how to operationalize, productize, and monetize that invention.
  • Finally, The Tweakers, who have very little resources, and make minor adjustments that transform the invention into a revolution.

Google is a company founded by tweakers of Lycos & Alta Vista. Sony ebooks were first, but Amazon dominates because they had the chance to see the impact of e-readers and then make adjustments. Finally, the iPad came along and introduce a tweaked tablet PC as a new challenge in the ebook space.

“Steve Jobs was always follower and borrower” The resurgence of Apple over the last 10 years, is based on his ability to tweak the PC, tweak the portable music player, tweak the blackberry, tweak the tablet PC, and now tweak the cloud.

…and if that wasn’t enough, he pressed further:

“Innovation at its best is a mass phenomenon, not an elite phenomenon.”

Gladwell’s asserts that the industrial revolution happened, because the West had an historical boom of dabblers and tweakers. James Watt was an implementor, only doubling steam efficiency; the anonymous tweakers increased it by another 500 times. Alexander Graham Bell’s voice-over-wire was only one of many contemporary tweaks of the telegraph’s signal-over-wire. Think of wikipedia. Think of crowd sourcing. Think of the old fashioned “suggestion box”.

It was a fascinating talk, and of course, wildly entertaining. Gladwell is a great story teller; memorizing an outline of his talk, offering just enough detail along the way, and adding energy throughout. Even his crazy hair helps amplify his enthusiasm.

But the talk would serve as the first in a personal series of innovation a-has. I’ll post those other reinforcing moments shortly. Until then, I leave you with this final quote and question: “Nimble adaptive organizations are mutually exclusive of innovative organizations.” Put another way, which kind of company do you work for? I’d like to hear if you think you are an ivory tower organization, or one that ruthlessly applies what already works?

A Full Week of Leadership Activities at PMI

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I just finished a week of activities at the PMI Leadership Institute Meeting, here in Washington DC. It was an amazing experience that reinforced to me the amazing value of volunteering at PMI.

Leadership Masters Class is “High Class”

My first 3 days were spent participating in the PMI Leadership Institute Masters Class program. This is a year long selective program to build the skills of PMI’s volunteer leaders. This first of three face-to-face sessions featured a bevy of interactive exercises and table discussions, allowing us to dig deep into the leadership question of trust. We also took a personality inventory called Strengths Deployment Inventory (SDI), where I gained some very un-nerving insights into how I respond to conflict.

The program is very focused on facilitating learning through relationships. One of the features was the class broke up into groups of 5 “learning partners”. My learning partner group is committed to building the relationships needed to hold me accountable on my objectives.

learning-partners.jpg

One of the more impressive elements of the class was the participation of PMI CEO Greg Balestrero. He explained that his strategy to support and grow it’s half-million constituents includes a focused investment into its 10,000 volunteer leaders. For him, leadership has become a critical strategic competency at PMI. Greg is a very busy man, with a very busy schedule. So, when he spends a morning with a group of 30 volunteers, it means he believes what he says.

greg-at-LIMC.jpg

 

 

In truth, I came to this kickoff event with some initial concerns. Some of my colleagues had heard and experienced mixed results with this PMI program. But I can honestly say I walked away very pleased, having become a more self-aware leader after only the first part of the program.



 

A New Direction for the PMI Agile Community

I spent a significant amount of time with Mike Cottmeyer, Brian Bozzuto, and Dennis Stevens planning the 2011 direction for the PMI Agile Community of Practice. Indeed, we skipped several sessions and instead had talked through the whole agile PM space, what our members are looking for, and how we can really promote the discipline of Agile PM. Here are some of the key outcomes from that discussion:

  • Mike Cottmeyer will be the new Chair of the Agile Community of Practice. For 2011, the roster of our community leadership council will remain unchanged. I will continue to serve on the council along with Dennis, Brian, Ainsley Nies, Bob Tarne, and Mike Griffiths. However, MIke has generously agreed to take the chairmainship for 2011, allowing me a bit of a break. Also, 2011 will be the year we host our first community elections, and transition the community leadership to a new batch of members.
  • We have an operational plan in place. Yes, many of us are skilled agile practitioners, but our distributed virtual setup really prevented the kind of self-organization we tried to foster last year. This week, we realized on many fronts, that our community volunteers need much more detail around what needs to be done, and how to do it. So, here is the plan to address that:
    • 2010 Q4 – The council will do the homework of (a) identifying the key initiatives for 2011, (b) generating the detailed acceptance criteria for each initiative, and (c) researching the how-to-instructions for implementing those initiatives
    • 2011 Q1 thru Q4 – Then, we will complete the handoff to more and more volunteers to implement those initiatives on a quarterly basis during 2011.
  • This year is going to be BIG for PMI Agile. During the week, we had the chance to talk with the staff at PMI headquarters about the Agile community and Agile PM in general. Already I’m seeing signs at the Congress of PMI’s growing investment in the promotion of agile. Their members are begging for vetted content, and PMI is responding. Also, with a new chair and a new volunteer base coming into place, we have a new infusion of energy to deliver more momentum.

This week was about connecting with leaders. Mike Cottmeyer had similar relections here, and Derek Huether enjoyed happy hour the most. PMI is a great place to find passionate, dedicated leaders, who will partner with you on your mission. I made some very good friends this week, and I am finding that it is your friends that shape who you are. You should strongly consider getting involved yourself, either as a volunteer at your local PMI chapter or with the PMI Agile Community of Practice.

An IT Wonderland in Omaha

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Last week I attended the Infotec 2010 conference in Omaha, NE and had quite the time meeting with IT professionals and talking about leadership and management challenges. The conference featured several vendors, including Cox, Microsoft, and Google. The facility was the awe-inspiring Qwest center. I estimate around 700-800 people showed up.

omaha-cox-booth

Agile Project Management Nuggets
The project management track was coordinated by the PMI Heartland Chapter, and featured two Agile PM talks. First, I retold the story of the PMI Agile Community, which was fun. But I was more excited by Sally Elatta and Kelly Morrell, who talked about the Agile transformation at Mutual of Omaha (download the slides here). Here are some of their great quotes:

  • PMBOK tells you WHAT to do, Agile tells you HOW to do it
  • "Thinking Agile" is more than just "Doing Agile"
  • servant leaders measure their success by their team’s growth
  • Your team doesn’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care
  • You will fail a few times in the beginning with Agile PM, but you’re supposed to; you need to fail in order to learn
  • Ask yourself as a PM, does this task/artifact/meeting add direct value to the business

Compelling Leadership Talks
Also interesting were 3 other talks outside the PM track. Stephen Balzac of 7 Steps Ahead described “Zen and the Art of Leadership”, Kate Brown of TechEdge talked about “High Performing Teams”, and Chris Russell from Google told us about “Building a Company Culture that Engages Employees”.

I really can’t do these talks justice with one blog post, but I can give you the uniting theme in building dynamic productive organizations:

  1. Craft a Clear & Compelling Vision – This is the high level project goal, with some conceptual success criteria. It can’t be simply “Implement the Requirements!” or “Deliver on time!”. Instead, I heard all three of these presenters independently describing the need for sticky ideas.
  2. Get the Right People: Kate called it “Hire and Professionally Develop Your Winning Team”, and Chris called it “Get the right people on the bus”.
  3. Serve Your Team; Don’t Make Them Serve You – Kate and Stephen both talked about Servant Leadership…it was uncanny how similar they were. Then, Chris gave some concrete suggestions like “Give employees ownership over the workplace” and “Give perks”

It was fascinating to see these three independent talks give startlingly similar advice.

Fabulous Keynotes.
Also during the conference, I got to see two fantastic keynotes:

  • Kansas State Professor Michael Welsch shared some of his insights on digital culture, based on his wildly popular YouTube video “The Machine is Using Us” and his research on Mediated Cultures.
  • Successful Nebraskan businessman Gordon Whitten shared his “7 Secrets to IT Entrepreneurial Success”, which are:
    1. Choose the right ‘what’: What you invest your energy in, is your biggest decision
    2. Go where the wind is at your back: Really hot field right now are mobile IT, healthcare IT, and cloud computing
    3. Find a durable competitive advantage: One example is “Ownable network effect” like Google Ads and Jigsaw
    4. Purple gorilla marketing: Based on Godin’s Purple Cow; think Webkins.
    5. Innovate on your business model: It yields 5x ROI over simply investing in more features.
    6. Relentlessly invest in relationships BEFORE you need something: Give until it hurts
    7. Crash through barriers: Winners endure standard obstacles like low payroll & lost business.

Omaha Agile Development


At the end of Day 1 of the conference, Sally drove me to the Omaha Agile Development user group, where I presented my PMBOK vs. Agile talk. People asked some hard questions, in particular:

  • How do you do Agile, when management insists on capitalizing labor by specialized skillset? This was a topic explored on the scrum discussion group recently, and people offered some good suggestions.
  • Isn’t Agile PM more conducive to products and less conducive to projects? This is a hot topic on the Agile scene right now. I’m not quite sure where I land on this debate, but it’s probably somewhere in the middle. See this post and also this one for thoughts.

I was really impressed by the group.

Personal Ignorance
I have to admit, I came to this conference with some pretty stereotypical views of Omaha engrained in my mind. If you asked me about Omaha, I would think mostly of Cornhusker football and Bruce Springsteen.

omaha-before-and-after

But by the time my two days were done, I had a completely different view: Omaha is a serious hub for IT business. From LinkedIn to Qwest, there are some pretty serious technology players there. Human ignorance can be an interesting topic, but most especially when I’m the one guilty of it.

Come Hear The PMI Agile Story At Infotec 2010

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Next month, I’ll be speaking at Infotec 2010, the largest IT conference in the Mid West.

infotec 2010

The conference features no less than 8 tracks, including information assurance, cloud computing, and such. My talk will be part of the project management track, organized by the PMI Heartland chapter.

I’ll be telling the story of how a group of PMI volunteers used Agile Project Management techniques to launch the first PMI Virtual Community of Practice.

Large venue. Diverse topics. It promises to be an exciting event.

Scrum Gathering Turns Into Free For All

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Day 3 of the Scrum Gathering this week was a fascinating experience. The day’s events were run in “Open Space” format, where the agenda was completely self-organized by the conference attendees. First, everyone was invited to post their suggestions for a topic onto the wall. Then, all the others came to the wall to see what was posted. Finally, attendees would vote for and negotiate on their favorite topics.

Scrum Gathering attendees choose topics

Now, at first it may seem like a disorganized free for all, but in truth it yielded some excellent conversations…

“Why are Project Managers Considered Agile Outsiders?”
The first session I visited explored the question of why Project Managers are perceived so poorly by Agilists. Some highlights were:

  • ScrumMaster and Product Owner are not job titles or job descriptions, but simply roles within a project.
  • Serge Beaumont suggested we move our PMOs into "scrum support teams”
  • Scrum Alliance President Tom Mellor explained that in his organization, the PM becomes the chief servant leader of a project organization, offering organizational support to team ScrumMasters.
  • The grouped agreed that PMs transition to Scrum best when changing their identity from "manager" to "member of product X"

tom mellor suggest the project manager become chief servant leader

Agile Outsourcing
The next session explored the topic of Agile Outsourcing. Often, “outsourcing” is a synonym for “offshoring”. Accordingly, it was not surprising that this conversation featured practitioners from Bolivia, Costa Rica, Bangladesh, and India. All of us traded humorous insights on the differences in cultural norms. For example, I learned of the “Bolivian ‘Yes’”, which asserts the listener merely hears you, rather than fully agrees to your request. We also talked about contracts, and agreed that offering your clients iterative, incremental funding options could give you a competitive advantage.

international Agile practioners discuss outsourcing

Vibrant Knowledge
After each session, the topic owner would type up his notes from the talk and post them on the “News Wall”. This way, I could get the gist of any session I couldn’t get to. There were also ad hoc discussions in the hallway, creating a atmosphere of vibrant knowledge, moving from one person to the next, each transfer being enriched by an individual perspective.

Scrum Gathering proceedings posted on conference wall

If I sound somewhat energized by the experience, I am. By many accounts this was the best Scrum Gathering ever. Each day offered a different format for learning, keeping people engaged and interested. Each session offered a different mix of participants, keeping the content varied and rich. If you get the chance, I strongly recommend you go to one of the upcoming Scrum Gatherings in Shanghai, South Africa, or Europe.

Question: Did you go the Scrum Gathering? What was most enlightening or helpful about the experience?

Scrum Gathering Collides with Project Management

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Yesterday was day 2 at the annual North American Scrum Gathering (click here for the events from day 1). The day featured several tracks covering a broad array of topics:

  1. The Edge of Chaos (innovation, risk, cunning…) Host:  Jimi Fosdick
  2. Huge Scrum! (Massive implementations) Host:  Sabine Canditt
  3. Good Practice (e.g. coding, testing, collaboration, design…)  Host:  Michel Goldenberg
  4. Scrum in Context (what Scrum can learn from other industries and research, and what Scrum can teach)  Host:  >>Bob Sarni
  5. When worlds collide – Scrum and traditional Project Management.  Host:  Dave Prior and Mike Cottmeyer

When Worlds Collide

“Agile project managers consider Scrum teams their customers”

That is a quote from Sanjiv Augustine in his “Agile PMO” talk. This was the first full session of the day for the Project Management track. His offered some interesting models of what a more adaptive PMO should look like. For example, PMOs should be virtual committees, whose members work on and report to real projects.

image

 

PMOs All Around Us.

For the next session, I moderated a panel discussion on the Agile PMO. Since Sanjiv had just spent an hour setting a baseline of what an Agile PMO could be, it was time to get down and dirty with some different perspectives. The panel included:

There was some fun banter back and forth, but we all settled on some core points. First, the PMO should be chartered to enforce principles, rather than compliance. Next, metrics should be driven primarily by business levers, and only secondarily by cost/schedule. All of these experts offered great insights and are worth looking up.

“Agile Project Manager….or not”

Closing out the day, Lyssa Adkins offered a compelling presentation on moving “Traditional Project Manager Turned Agile Coach”. This talk offered some of the best observations about the Project Manager role, and they were posted on the PMI Agile twitter feed. At the end of the talk, Mike Cottmeyer gave an abbreviated Pecha Kucha version of his “Agile PMP” talk, which served as a dynamic counterpoint to Lyssa’s points. Then, at the end of the talk, they started riffing off each other, and arriving at some strong agreement, despite the seemingly opposite positions of their presentation titles.

image

The day featured an enjoyable  knowledge exchange for the relationship of Scrum to project management. Tomorrow will be day 3, featuring an open space format.

Question: What do you think of the observations of these experts?

Orlando Scrum Gathering Kicks Off With A Bang #sgus

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This week marks the annual North American Scrum Gathering in Orlando. This year’s event promises to be very dynamic, with a track dedicated to project management as well as several Pecha Kucha talks.

Day Zero
But before the festivities even began, Mike Vizdos and Jean Tabaka convened a pre-gathering  retreat for Certified Scrum Trainers/Coaches. Thirty or so of Scrum’s thought leaders spent a full day trading tips and techniques for helping people learn and do Agile Project Management with Scrum.

image

There was much discussion around the correlation between coaching and training. The consensus that, regardless of which certification you hold, you need to do both coaching and training for any successful Agile change initiative.

Day 1 Kickoff
Then yesterday came the big kickoff. Scrum Alliance President, Tom Mellor, welcomed 300 attendees. Like last year, he asked for a show of hands for who was a PMI member / PMP, and a solid 40%-50% responded. He also announced the Scrum Alliance board will feature member-elected slots starting in the second quarter of this year. Then Luke Hohmann briefed everyone on the process the Scrum Alliance used to prioritize the backlog of member needs and requests. The results are yet to be finalized, but it was encouraging to see the Scrum Alliance share how intentional it is being with developing its strategic plan. After these introductions, Jeff Sutherland and Kent Johnson took the stage to talk about Scrum + CMMI. And offered some juicy quotes and tidbits:

  • Regarding role of managers in large scrum: learn to let go of control, motivate improvement, and lead.
  • Some companies are using scrum to manage their cmmi level 3 efforts…with great results
  • Root cause analysis of failures. Is a key source for Scrummaster’s impediment list
  • common benefit of cmmi is rework. Systematic, a CMMI Level 5 agile company moved from 50% of efforts reworked to 6%
  • scrum maps closely to cmmi level 3 when used with agile engineering
  • 50% of Scrum teams do not have working software at the end of
  • “pure scrum” doesn’t make sense and is useless.
  • 20% improvement with scrum is a waste of time you shoul be striving for 10x improvement
  • Self-organization does NOT mean you get to do what you want
  • Don’t misread the agile manifesto to say process has NO value

Day 1 Deep Dive
After the intro sessions, there were several day-long deep-dive sessions to choose from:

  • Dialogue Room & Scrum Clinic hosted by Michael de la Maza and Gerry Kirk
    Project management, How to: Specify Critical Product Quality Requirements -  Tom Gilb and Kai Gilb
  • Software Craftsmanship Workshop – Micah Martin
  • Artful Making Workshop – Lee Devin
  • Coaching the Coaches - Lyssa Adkins
  • The Kanban Exploration – Karl Scotland
  • Coaching Self-Organized Teams - Joseph Pelrine
  • Improv: The Mechanics of Collaboration - Matt Smith
  • Innovation Games® for Scrum Teams - Luke Hohmann

I chose Innovation Games®, and was floored. After only a couple hours, I knew that I would simply have to attend the full 2-day class to get all the golden goodness Luke had to offer.

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Innovation Games® are facilitation techniques for collecting, organizing, and prioritizing requirements. I continue to be amazed at how little project managers (i.e. people like me) are trained in real product management. I used to think “requirements management” was about enforcing scope with change requests, but now there’s a whole new world I’ve been exposed to. For example, here’s a question every PM should be able to answer: how do you know your requirements are even correct? Yeah, it stumped me too.

It was a fantastic first day, with only more exciting stuff to come tomorrow.

Come hear me speak at the 2010 Scrum Gathering

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This year, the 2010 Scrum Gathering in Orlando is featuring a dedicated project management track called “When worlds collide – Scrum and traditional Project Management”. I’ve been invited to participate in two sessions:

  • “Agile Contracts for the Real World” – This will be a blitz talk in Pecha Kuca format (20 slides, 20 seconds each). The last time I did one of these was at the 2009 PMI Global Congress, also in Orlando.
  • “Roundtable on the Agile PMO” – I will be moderating a panel discussion freaturing some pretty impressive experts: “Leading Agile” blogger Mike Cottmeyer; Scrum expert and PMP Jimi Fosdick; APLN co-founder Sanjiv Augustine, and Lyssa Adkins, the Agile coaches’ coach.

Not only is the PM track worth checking out, but PMPs get members get a $100 discount off regular registration. Hope to see you there.

Project Management…in Cairo

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Earlier this month, I was fortunate enough to participate in The Projects To The Point (P2P) conference in Cairo, Egypt. Over 400 professionals from the region came to network and learn about effective project management, and to high-end networking. PMI had a significant presence there, as well as over a dozen corporate sponsors.

P2P vargas

The conference was supported by no less than 4 PMI components (IT&Telecom SIG, the Middle East / North Africa chapter, the Arabian Gulf Chapter, and the PMI Agile Community of Practice).

PMI Big Wigs
Also featured were both last year’s PMI Chairman Philip Diab and this years PMI Chairman Ricardo Vargas. Vargas started off with his opening keynote where he emphasized the importance of good project management, saying “the only path from innovation to results is project execution”. He then made the provacative point that PMI’s strategic planning for 2010 will focus on Africa, and Egypt is positioned to be an economic gateway to Africa. Vargas also issued a podcast describing his overall impression of the conference.

Agile Government
The conference was held under the auspices of Egypt’s Minister of State of Administrative Development, H.E. Dr. Ahmed Darwish and the Minister of Health H.E. Dr. Hatem El Gabaly. In his keynote, Darwish cited the direct relationship of project management to 2 of the government’s 6 mission values: efficiency and agility.

P2P delegates

Agile @ P2P
The P2P conference featured a dedicated track to Agile / Scrum techniques. The track featured 11 sessions from 5 speakers over the course of two days. Some of the more choice statements were:

  1. Dave Prior on his bad XP experience: “developers prioritizing stories and one person in each pair reading ESPN.com instead of helping”.
  2. Dave Prior on being the reluctant agilist: “To be effective, you can pick and choose from PMBOK, but with Scrum you have to use all of it. . The longer you’ve been doing traditional PM, the more skeptical you will be of Scrum, and more tempted to cut out parts of it”.
  3. Dave Prior on being the reluctant agilist: “transitioning to Agile does NOT mean abandoning everything you know as a traditional project manager”.
  4. Dave Prior on do-what-you-want-Agile: Custom Agile is like Jazz. No one every played as good as Coltraine after merely reading a book about it. You have to practice the basics before you can go off script.
  5. Thushara Wijewardena on adoption Agile PM in the real world: “It’s not a fairy tale.”
  6. Thushara Wijewardena coins a phrase for the endless reply messages on project teams: “mad email syndrome”
  7. Thushara Wijewardena gives a tip for rescuing offshore projects: invite the western client to your exotic location for a work session
  8. Thushara Wijewardena says the adage “what has not been written has not been said” goes away when you trust your team and sponsor

P2P presenting

Summary
I don’t even have the time or space to mention all the other great presenters from the other tracks. Brisk Consulting, PMI IT&Telecom, PMI MENA put on a truly high-quality event. For more insights, you can read what Bob Tarne and Dave Prior had to say. It was quite the experience.