Tag Archives: PMI Agile

Yes, I Am Writing a PMI-ACP Exam Book

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PMI-ACP book. Agile experts tell you the agile way to earn PMI's new agile certification

I’m excited to announce that I’m writing a book to help agile practitioners earn the new PMI-ACP agile certification. 4 years ago, I started by helping PMI launch the Agile Community of Practice. Then 2 years ago, I worked with some great experts on building the certification program. Now, this book is the next step in my journey to encourage project leaders to grow in their understanding of Agile project management.

Also, this book will benefit from a lot of talent. I’m writing the book with my good friend Hiren Doshi. We’ve engaged visual communication experts Take-Action.com to illustrate the book, and have brought on some good editors.

Our target is to complete the book by the start of 2012, but anyone who’s written a book knows there are challenges to that. For example, people are beginning to post their initial feedback on the exam, which may cause a lot of last minute changes to what information is most helpful.

Also, You can go to the official website and download a free sample chapter to see what we’re trying to achieve.

So here is my question: What would you like to see in a PMI-ACP exam book?

Latest News About the PMI Agile (PMI-ACP) Certification

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PMI Agile Certification

Since PMI announced its Agile certification program a couple months back, there has been a ton of activity. Here are some specifics:

  • Chatter – The PMI Agile Community about the certification has featured some good dialog (PMI Members only link) about what it means. The most interesting is a webinar debate between Alistair Cockburn and James Shore on the pros/cons of certification. PMI members can download that webinar for free.
  • Momentum – PMI’s CIO gave at talk at last month’s Scrum Gathering conference in Seattle, where he revealed that more than 6,000 professionals have already registered for the pilot program. That’s more than triple the number of certification holders for PMI’s last 3 certifications COMBINED (PgMP, PMI-RP, PMI-SP). In case it wasn’t obvious already, people want this.
  • Training – Yes, I have built a PMI-Agile curriculum, which is being field-tested right now in India. But there are some other trainers that I am very excited to see also building a curriculum, including Ahmed Sidkey in Egypt, Mike Griffiths in Canada.
  • Resources – With a new landscape, comes experimentation. Some early offerings are starting to show up, from flash cards, to practice exams, and even some pre-published books. AgileScout has been reporting on some of these, so keep a look there as well.

As one of the people who helped shape this program, I’m pretty excited about the buzz. Given that the mission for this program is to increase the awareness and adoption of Agile PM, I’m already seeing an ROI on our efforts.

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.

Bad Requirements? Actually, That’s Your Fault

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This is a reprint of my column in this month’s PM Network magazine. Click here, and then search for “The Agile Project Manager”

I’m growing weary of project managers whining about bad requirements. The truth is, no one can possibly be surprised. From research studies to high-profile disasters, we hear over and over that incorrect requirements and poor scope management are key reasons projects fail. If we know this is a recurring problem in our profession, why do we mindlessly continue engaging in the rote repetition of what doesn’t work? I’d like to share some suggestions to keep us from stumbling over the same mistakes:

Surrender the pipe dream of complete requirements.
There’s always going to be one dependency missed, one stakeholder we didn’t interview, one nuance hidden, one more thing we wished we had known. Don’t fall into the trap that more is better or you’ll never get started.

Always assume the initial requirements are wrong.
Sometimes the scope is inappropriately slanted toward one stakeholder or hasn’t been properly vetted. Sometimes the bulk of the requirements are actually “nice-to-haves.” Today’s project manager is expected to have the organizational savvy and facilitation skills to get to the root of these problems. To ensure that you yield the right priorities at the right time, take the initial scope statement as a starting point, then work with the sponsor to refine it.

Accept that all requirements change.
Traditional project management culture portrays change as a necessary evil, like traffic laws: If drivers did everything right, we wouldn’t need them. To mitigate the “risk” of change, we install intimidating change-control boards and financial penalties. But what if the scope you’ve been implementing for the last two years is no longer relevant to the market? Does it make sense to have your sponsor continue paying for what is now
essentially a useless deliverable? Not in my estimation. If we accept that our requirements are incomplete and incorrect, then we need to edit them to reflect reality. Indeed, A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) warns: “Because of the potential for change, the project management plan is iterative and goes through progressive elaboration throughout the project’s life cycle.”

Simplify your change-management approach.
Agile project managers explicitly embrace the value of responding to change and institute project policies accordingly. Start by implementing a contract structure that supports authorized change rather than penalizes it. At the start of each iteration, mandate a high-level yet thorough revision of scope priorities. If your sponsor has difficulty determining priorities, coach him or her through the tradeoffs. Once changes are accepted, re-baseline earned value metrics at least every three to four iterations to match the latest scope. And while you’re at it, proactively communicate the latest scope to all stakeholders.

If you consistently find your requirements getting you into trouble, do something about it. It’s your responsibility as the project manager to be adaptable to your sponsor’s needs. Stop taking the requirements for granted and start equipping your sponsor to make the right scope choices.

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 Certification for South Florida PMs

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To those of you in the sunshine state, I will be teaching a Certified ScrumMaster class next month on behalf of the PMI South Florida Chapter.

I’m particularly excited about this session, because we’ll be tailoring the material specifically for every day project managers who have been trained in PMI circles. So, we’ll be covering Scrum for sure, but we’ll also talk about converting burndowns to EVM, how to work with CMMI, and most especially where the PM fits in an Agile environment. And we’ll be doing it hands-on exercises of real-world business scenarios.

Here are the details:

  • Class: Certified ScrumMaster for Project Managers
  • Date: March 18-19, 2010
  • Location: Westin at Ft. Lauderdale, FL
  • Price: $1,400 for general admission ($1,200 for members of PMI South Florida)
  • PDUs: 16

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.

PMI Leadership Institute Meeting 2009 Orlando – Finale

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Yesterday was the wrapup of the PMI Leadership Institute Meeting here in Orlando. As I made my way to the morning’s events, I noticed started to see some final preparations for Congress.

pmilim prep

I started my day sitting in a session on “visualization as a tool for leaders”. The presenter walked us through an exercise around visualizing your goals in your mind, as an accelerator for accomplishing them. Try this: write a description of a butterfly, then mentally visualize it in great detail, then write down what you visualized. If you compare the differences, you’ll notice more charactar and detail in the second writeup than in the first. He then cited the examples of Jack Nicklaus, Jean Claude Kitty, Sean Casey as successfully using “mental visualization” for athletic training. The science behind it is interesting. I’ve always known about the left-right brain dichotomy, as dramatically explained by Jill Bolte Taylor on TED.com. However, I didn’t realize that what Shakespeare calls the “Minds Eye” is actually your Reticular Activation System.

Fascinating.

To hammer it home, he walked us through a meditative visual of an what an outrageously successful communication plan would look like. If you’ve ever had problems crafting a vision of where you want your organization to go, this can be a very helpful tool.

During a long afternoon break, I got a chance to sit in on the Annual Membership Meeting for the Retail Community of Practice. The Retail CoP recently completed their transition from the legacy SIG model to the Virtual Community model, so we had a lot of similar lessons learned. It was really affirming to hear that PMI Agile is not the only one experiencing the challenges we’ve had.

Afterwards, I got a chance to say goodbye to some of the excellent leaders I met this week. Over 700 people came to LIM to collaborate on how best to advance the discipline of project management, as a means to improve the world. These are very, very passionate people. And for that reason alone, I really enjoy hanging out with them.

pmilim tampa

Finally, the evening featured the awards ceremony, where Agile Project Management author Karen R.J. White was awarded a PMI fellowship for her decade-long contribution to PMI.

Tomorrow begins the Congress, with lots of Agile PM activity. Stay tuned. LIM was great for promoting the PMI Agile community to fellow leaders, but Congress promises to influence the profession with the Agile mindset.

PMI Leadership Institute Meeting 2009 Orlando – Day 2

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Day 2 of the PMI’s Leadership Institute Meeting started off with a plenary session on acquiring and retaining members. PMI’s Tom Bates was the presenter, and he reviewed the same presentation that was covered at LIM in Europe back in May, where PMI discussed membership attrition patterns. Here are some key points:

  • The constituent breakdown for PMI is evenly broken down as members-only, PMP-only, and PMP+member. Members leave in droves after getting certified. The surveys tell us that PMs become members for recognition, and they renew for knowledge
  • As PMI leaders, we need to move from a transactional member relationship to an experiential one
  • In 1997 93% of PMPs were North American. Today, it’s 55%. “we need to speak with a global voice”

Then, PMI’s Cindy Anderson talked about the marketing campaigns and services recently launched to address these patterns. The crowd was generally skeptical. Most of the leaders seemed to agree with PMI’s changes, but were very unhappy with the notification process. PMI charged us to tweak the way we serve our members, yet most of the leaders here interpreted that as more work. Another consistent theme was that leaders were not getting the memos PMI sends about these changes. When asked who in the group knew of PMI’s Facebook page or twitter feed (@PMInstitute), only 12 of 400 people raised their hands. So somebody is either not communicating effectively or somebody is not listening. It was a very revealing tiff.

pmilim pelted

Next I attended a review of PMI’s technology systems, presented by their VP of technology, Frank Schettini. He explained that new PDU system is live, more scalable and easier for PMPs and vendors to use. He commited that PMI will be more transparent about the technology roadmap/backlog going forward, but set the expectation that improving the online user experience will be “incemental, not big-bang”. It was an interesting quote to me as an Agilist, but then he just came out and admitted, “yes, we use Scrum to roll out our technology”. How ’bout them apples?

pmilin frank

After that was a breakout session on Virtual Communities. The big picture for PMI’s launching of communities of practice was described as becoming “the” preferred source for knowledge of the PM profession. That big picture means achieving credibility, relevance, and accessibility. Regarding “Accessibility”, one of the key areas of confusion was over LIGs vs specific interest branches…who owns which and who’s allowed to do what. Eventually, the Women-In-PM chair Rose Mary Tyer stood up and offered her LIG charters as examples for others to use. Then, leaders were complaining the business plan template PMI requires too heavy (I confess to being one of those whiners). PMI then agreed to open a 3 week dialog to trim it down. Finally, Mark Lurch of the IT&Telecom SIG asked how to PMI intends to measure success in new CoP model? PMI suggested surveys & web usage, but asked leaders to offer their own definition.

All in all a very busy day.