Seattle APLN Update and Agile Program Management Slides
July 25, 2008
Last week I attended the APLN Leadership Summit in Seattle. It was a great event and while I was disappointed I did not get to learn more about Real Options and iteration-less Kanban (because I was busy hosting a competing session with Mike Cottmeyer). I had a good time and met some great people.
The event was held at the very swank Edgewater hotel, located on the waterfront, near Pier 67. It is a chic combination of log, steel, timber, and river-rock. Due to some reservation mix up my standard room was upgraded the “Beatles Suite”. Scene of the 1964 Beatles stay and the photo of them fishing out of a hotel window. The suite was large and fun in a “Austin Powers meets Yogi Bear” kind of way (Union Jack cushions, log furniture, etc) – anyway being British I am always curious to what other nationalities associate with Britain.
The summit started with a great keynote by Lisa Haneberg. Some points that really resonated with me were bringing a sense of energy and creating a vision. A nice graphic she used to visualize this is shown below.
This diagram depicts the Current Reality in the bottom yellow oval and projects up to Probable Future and Preferred Future state ovals that could happen. Obviously we would favour the preferred future state and so we should focus on the “Things We Need to Start Doing” to get there and make sure we stop doing the “Things We Need to Stop Doing” activities that would lead us to the less desirable Probable Future.
Lisa pointed out that good visions stretch the Possible Future envelope (which is why the Preferred Future oval extends beyond the Possible Future set.) It is good to have some element of “How on earth are we going to do this!” within the vision.
For those that visualize time going left to right and good scales going upwards (weird people like me) I have redrawn the diagram.
Mike Cottmeyer and I facilitated the Agile Program Management track and as always, the best content and value came from the attendees who shared their experiences of agile program challenges and solutions. In the afternoon we discussed integrating agile projects with traditional project management frameworks and reviewed some slides that show the sweet spot for agile within the entire project scope, mechanisms for external parties to interact with agile teams, and a hybrid agile plan.
I have uploaded the images here.