Thank you for visiting my site or subscribing to this feed. Regardless of how you access this content thanks for your patience. I have not been writing recently, instead using my spare time to enjoy the great summer weather we have had here the Canadian Rockies. However that is about to change, I intend to post more frequently and am excited about the new content, training courses and opportunities I have planned for the fall.

On May 5^th I will be presenting at the PMI-NAC Conference on the following topics:

1. 21^st Century Risk Management: Supporting mathematical analysis with social influence
2. PMO Evolution: Frameworks to Support a Mix of Traditional, Agile and Lean Project Approaches

I am looking forward to the event and will share thoughts and feedback on the sessions here afterwards. Until then here are the presentation outlines:

Presentation 1: ”21^st Century Risk Management: Supporting mathematical analysis with social influence”

Today’s complex projects need proactive risk management to stand any chance of executing successfully. Yet, all the steps of: identifying, classifying, analyzing and prioritizing are for nothing if the risks cannot be effectively avoided, transferred, or reduced. These risk avoidance and reduction steps are largely human led activities with success criteria closely linked to social influence.

While the project manager is key to project co-ordination and success, they are rarely the domain experts and instead bring subject matter experts (SMEs) together to collaborate on novel solutions. These knowledge worker projects require a whole team approach to not only risk finding, but also risk resolving.

This session explains the need for proactive risk management and the importance of social influence on risk management. Using case studies, a team approach to risk management to collaborative workshops, new risk visualization techniques, and examples of team risk avoidance and risk mitigation actions are examined.

Presentation 2: ”PMO Evolution: Frameworks to Support a Mix of Traditional, Agile and Lean Project Approaches”

Agile, lean and kanban approaches are a part of the new project delivery toolkit, especially for projects with IT components. The PMBOK Guide v5 published in January 2013 now describes a lifecycle spectrum spanning “Predictive, Iterative & Incremental and Adaptive” approaches. The new “Software Extension to the PMBOK Guide” expands this model with further agile related guidance for project execution.  Gartner Research claims 80% of today’s software projects employ agile methods. So, is your PMO living in denial, or simply living in the past?

Fortunately, a new class of PMO has evolved to support a dynamic mix of traditional, agile and lean project approaches that we can learn from. Using case studies from award winning PMOs, this presentation examines how proactive organizations are tracking diverse project types with common metrics and enablers.

This post is a personal reflection. 2014 marks the 20^th anniversary of DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development Method). Ten years ago, back in 2004 I wrote the article “DSDM 10 Years on, RAD Relic or Agile Advocate?”, on re-reading it 10 years later I think it still holds true. It can be found on page 49 of this Agile Times newsletter.

Just looking at the names of contributors to that newsletter (Ken Schwaber, Martin Fowler, Mike Cohn, Lisa Crispin, Ester Derby, Brain Marick, Kent McDonald, Dianna Larsen, J.B. Rainsberger, Barbara Roberts, Linda Rising, Deb Hartmann, etc) reminds me of some of the great people I have been fortunate to work with over the years. Also how lucky we were to have such excellent collaboration from these thought leaders in a single publication. Good luck trying to get them all to contribute to a single conference today let alone an unpaid newsletter!

Realizing I have been doing pretty much the same thing for the last 20 years stirs up a few emotions. First of all there seems a worrying lack of career progression. Today I am managing agile projects along with training, consulting and writing. Back then I was also managing agile projects and consulting. However, just to prove my career councillor wrong - who said I would never go far, I did move from England to Canada which by anyone’s standard is pretty far!

I have tried other roles; I have had several stints as a program manager, development director and in various PMO roles. However I have always gone back to project management. It is what I love and what interests me. I read, on average, two project management books a month and am not getting tired of them. In fact the stack of new books to read on my desk is growing faster than ever.

I just don’t feel the same enthusiasm for program management or PMO work, for me, it is a little too far removed from actually executing projects. It is the problem solving, stakeholder coordination, execution and sense of achievement from delivery that gives me a buzz and keeps me excited about work.

Over the last 20 years the methods that we now call Agile have matured and morphed enormously. The whole Agile Manifesto popularity explosion of the early 2000’s opened up a tide of mostly good awareness and opportunities. Yes, a bunch of people jumped on the band wagon without really understanding things and caused some harm, but the vast majority of growth and adoption that I have seen has been extremely positive.

All in all I feel very lucky, I get to work in a field I find extremely interesting. While many of my colleagues have created large agile consulting and training companies, they now don’t get as much hands on project work. Maybe I lack their entrepreneurial spirit, business drive or sales skills, maybe my career councillor was right, but I can honestly say I’d be really happy to do what I am doing now for the next 20 years. I have no exit strategy planned or dreams of escaping it all.

I graduated in 1986 when the Timbuk3 song “The Future is so bright I gotta wear shades” was popular. From that song the line “Fifty thou a year -- buys a lot of beer” may no longer be true, but It feels to me that agile concepts are just getting started and the future is so bright. Hence, maybe like a family doctor who practices for many years, learning more but still in the same role, I will appease my uneasy guilt of treading water with a justification that is OK and hope I get to continue for the next 20.

On November 12, 2013 Mike was presented with a PMI-SAC Fellow award at the PMI-SAC Awards Gala. The Fellow Award recognizes and honours members who have made sustained and significant contributions to the project management profession and the Institute for more than a decade.

Mike was recognized for his work developing agile project management techniques and promoting agile project management including:

• Co-author “Using DSDM with PRINCE2” white paper 2000
• Presenting on “Utilizing Agile Methods alongside the PMBOK Guide” at the PMI Global Congress 2004
• Teaching the 2 day course “Agile Project Management” as part of the PMI SeminarsWorld training program 2005-2013
• Contributions to the PMBOK Guide v3, v4 and v5 as a core team member 2006-2013
• Co-founding the PMI Agile Community of Practice  2008
• Steering Committee member for the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) Certification 2010-2012
• PMI-SAC Mentor 2009-2010
• Co-author of the “Software Extension to the PMBOK Guide” 2011-2013
• PMI-SAC Professional Development Conference (PDC) presenter 2006-2013
• Author “PMI-ACP Exam Preparation” book 2012
• PMI Global Congress white papers and presentations 2005-2013

Mike is very grateful to receive this award and hopes to be active in the next 10 years of project management promotion and development.

I have had a busy autumn and it has been too long since I posted here. I did some consulting in Europe and attended the PMI Global Congress in New Orleans to present on “21^st Century Risk Management” with Dennis Stevens.

More recently our local PMI Chapter won the “Chapter of the Year” award and held their excellent Professional Development Conference that I gave a couple of presentations at. The first on “PMO Evolution: Frameworks for Integrating Lean, Agile and Traditional Projects” and one on “Surviving Agile Projects” aimed at traditional project managers transitioning to manage their first agile project.

The consulting and conference interactions led to a number of ideas for application on agile projects that I will be sharing here in upcoming posts. At our local PMI conference in Calgary last week Bob Lutz, Retired Vice Chairman of General Motors Corporation gave a great talk on design and project management.

He was discussing the importance of defined, repeatable process for efficient, high quality production. Strict compliance and rigorous process controls certainly help improve the manufacturing process. What was interesting was his cautions about applying defined, repeatable processes to design work. He said it flat out does not work and can lead to terrible products.

Bob recounted how upon rejoining General Motors in 2001 he asked “Who the hell designed the Pontiac Aztek?” (which appears on many Top 10 worst car design lists and is generally slammed from a design perspective – although liked by some loyal owners.) The Pontiac engineers were very defensive claiming that in fact the design of the Aztek was one of the best executed vehicle design projects that had run, hitting each of its targets and assessment milestones during the process. Lutz went on to say while some processes need rigour, design processes need collaboration, feedback and frequent verification to ensure we are on the right track.

As we execute our projects I think there is great value in determining if we are designing something or manufacturing something. The creation of software solutions is like car design, we are trying to understand the problem space and create candidate prototypes for evaluation and evolution towards the best available solution. This requires collaboration, feedback and frequent verification.

Other projects like upgrading servers and training 500 people are more defined, repeatable activities that can benefit from well defined process and strict controls. Most projects I have worked on have elements of both work types mixed together. An important skill for project managers is to know when to employ strict process and when to encourage less structured collaboration where designs evolve based on build-feedback cycles.

I really enjoyed Bob’s talk; he is an engaging speaker who tells things as he sees them and I look forward to reading his latest book “Icons and Idiots”. Over the coming weeks and months I intend to post here more frequently and continue the dialog on the smart application of process and pragmatism.

My next PMI-ACP Exam Preparation course will be November 18, 19, 20 in Calgary, Alberta. The course will be capped to 15 people for better Q&A and will take place at historic Fort Calgary which is close to downtown on 9^th Avenue and has free parking.

Since I am offering the class in my home town I have no travel costs and can offer the course for a discounted price of $1,290 for 3 days including lunches and snacks, my book, color printed workbook, sample exam questions, and USB stick of additional materials. (You can deduct another $60 if you already have a copy of my PMI-ACP Prep book).

The course has a 100% pass rate and uses Turning Technologies audience response technology. Following the course each participant receives a personalized follow-up study plan based on their sample question performances. For more details see the Course Outline.  To reserve your place or ask questions please contact [email protected].

Apologies for the slow rate of articles here at LeadingAnswers.com recently, but I moved to Canada to enjoy the outdoors and it is prime hiking and biking season. Normal posting frequency (which is still not that frequent) will return after our all too short summer.

Meanwhile I will repost some articles I wrote for ProjectManagement.com to fill the void. First a couple of pictures from last weekend’s 24 Hours of Adrenaline bike race in Canmore.

I will be presenting a paper at the PMI Global Congress in New Orleans, October 27-29. Entitled “21^st Century Risk Management: Supporting Mathematical Analysis with Social Influence” it is about bringing the local influence of people and persuasion to the analytical world of risk management.

All too often risk management is treated as a dispassionate science of probabilities. However projects are people oriented with risks (and opportunities in particular) being greatly influenced by behaviour. Experiments made in moving risks and opportunities from the methodical risk analysts and project managers to social “project charmers” have shown great results in risk reduction and opportunity exploitation. This partnership between math and social influence seems to be a winning combination and the presentation explains some case studies where this has been applied with great success.

I hope to be presenting the session with Dennis Stevens who shares many of my views on agile risk management. I have worked with Dennis on a number of initiatives including the PMI-ACP certification and the Software Extension to the PMBOK Guide. I enjoy Dennis’ sense of humor and depth of knowledge. I am really looking forward to the event.

Shown below is the outline description for the paper:

21^st Century Risk Management: Supporting Mathematical Analysis with Social Influence

Today’s complex projects need proactive risk management to stand any chance of executing successfully. Yet, all the steps of: identifying, classifying, analyzing and prioritizing in the world are for nothing if the risks cannot be effectively avoided, transferred, or reduced. These risk avoidance and reduction steps are largely human led activities with success criteria closely linked to social influence, communications and campaigning. 

While the project manager is critical to project co-ordination and success, they are rarely the domain experts on modern projects and instead bring subject matter experts (SMEs) together to collaborate on novel solutions. These knowledge worker projects require a whole team approach to not only risk finding, but also risk resolving.

This session explains the need for proactive risk management through an examination of the “Flaw of Averages”, it walks through the risk management process examining traditional and lean/agile based processes. Then the importance of social influence in risk mitigation is explored. Using case studies, a shared team approach to risk management is described. Through collaborative games, new risk visualization techniques, and empowered teams, examples of risk avoidance and risk mitigation actions are examined.

21^st Century risk management should be a whole team activity facilitated by the project manger or risk analyst. Not only is relying on a single person to identify and analyze risks and opportunities inadequate, it also represents an unacceptable risk of its own.  Also, often there is a mismatch in personalities between the people best able to analyze risks and those best able to influence them. A new framework that leverages people’s strengths while optimizing the whole value stream is presented. 

Professional athletes watch slow motion video of their performances to find areas for improvement. Armed with this information they can then work on these weaknesses and improve their performance. When studying for an exam how do you objectively measure your skills acquisition and areas of weakness that need to be worked on? Practice tests can help, especially if the questions are categorized into knowledge areas so we can tell which topics candidates understand and which they need more work on.

As a trainer I am also trying to get feedback from the group on whether people understand what I am talking about. I ask them of course, using questions like:  “Does this make sense?”, “Are there any questions on this?”, but I never really know. Cultural norms vary considerably, do polite nods and no questions mean am I preaching to the choir and they know all this stuff already, or they just don’t want to ask questions?

I recently started incorporating audience response systems (clickers) into my training courses, and while no silver bullet, they do provide useful objective feedback. I introduced them so that participants on my PMI-ACP Exam Prep course could answer end of module practice exam questions and get personal reports of how they did to help their study plan.

However the benefits go further, as a trainer I can poll the group with a quick question and if everyone gets it right move right along. Like Fist of Five voting a quick confirmation allows us to move efficiently, but if there is confusion or division of opinion then we can investigate and go deeper into topics. No longer do I have to decide if blank stares mean consent or incomprehension of my accent, now I have some hard data.

It allows for some fun games too, like prizes for most right answers, fastest responders, fastest correct responders, etc. Obviously leader boards just show the top 3 or so people, it is counter productive to show the lower part of ranked lists.

Using these tools we can provide detailed individual analysis of question responses that would otherwise require invasive supervision. Not only which categories did you score the highest and lowest on, but which questions you took the longest to answer, or changed you mind on the answer to select. This meta data helps target follow up studying for participants and also provides me with some useful feedback as I teach.

I used the system live for the first time last week in Bucharest, Romania and will be using them again for my Calgary course next week.

My PMI-ACP Exam Preparation course will be April 15, 16, 17 in Calgary, Alberta. The course will be capped to 15 people for better Q&A and will take place at Fort Calgary which is close to downtown on 9^th Avenue and has free parking.

Since I am offering the class in my home town I have no travel costs and can offer the course for a discounted price of $1,290 for 3 days including lunches and snacks, my book, color printed workbook, sample exam questions, and USB stick of additional materials. (You can deduct another $60 if you already have a copy of my PMI-ACP Prep book). To reserve your place or questions please contact [email protected].

Continue reading to see further details from the Course Outline

I am pleased to announce / preview the first public offering of my new 3 day PMI-ACP Exam Preparation course. This is my second generation PMI-ACP Exam Prep course, with new content and updated material based on a year’s worth of feedback from my PMI-ACP Exam Prep book. Participants will receive a copy of my book (or a discount if they already have it). The structure mirrors the book flow, providing in-depth explanations, examples and new sample questions for all the material in the PMI-ACP exam.

The course will provide the 21 Contact Hours of training required to take the exam and uses a small class size format so everyone’s questions can be answered. The first course will be held in Calgary in the April / May timeframe with full details and pricing to be announced soon. If you are interested in receiving further announcements contact [email protected] to be added to the mailing list.

An outline of the course can be viewed here.

The Project Zone Congress will be taking place in Frankfurt, March 18-19. I attended the Project Zone Congress last year and was impressed by the quality of sessions and access to speakers for Q & A. This year’s conference is set to repeat the format and has some great speakers including Jurgen Appelo author of “Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders”. I love this title and wish I’d come up with it myself!

Readers of LeadingAnswers can receive a 10% discount from the conference by using the code “PZ2012_MEDIA03B869C8” when they register. It promises to be a high caliber conference with sessions on practical agile, the PMO and agile, strategy and leadership, see the schedule for full details.

The “Software Extension to The PMBOK Guide” is available for public review here. It is a PMI hosted site, but you do not need to be a PMI member to access the draft. This is the first full exposure of the draft. It was completed earlier in the year and sent to some subject matter experts for review, but has not been made publicly available before. So, if you have an interest in how the PMBOK Guide should be augmented/modified for software projects take a look and submit you comments.

As a parallel, the Extension to the PMBOK Guide for Construction, has been available for a number of years and it offers guidance to project managers in the construction business. The role of the Software Extension, is to fulfil a similar role, but this time for managers of software projects that often face changing requirements, evolving technologies, and bringing together divergent knowledge workers to collaborate on challenging problems. For these project environments the Software Extension describes a spectrum of Predictive, Adaptive and Agile Lifecycles that may be used and more people based, as opposed to process based, development strategies.

I know asking how the PMBOK Guide can best be changed for software projects will likely prompt some colourful suggestions, but that’s half the fun. We will have to review all the suggestion and having the odd passonate suggestion brightens up the review process. I once worked with a developer who used a copy of the PMBOK Guide to raise the level of his monitor to approximately the same height as his other monitor. When he heard I was working on the next version of the PMBOK Guide he said that he uses his copy every day, and it was indispensable, but could we add another 10-15 pages to the next version (so his monitors would be perfectly aligned).

So, please take a look, we really do value your feedback, both good and bad. The role of the Software Extension is to modify and extend the PMBOK Guide recommendations for project managers in the software industry. It will be published in mid/late 2013 with your feedback incorporated or politely passed over, as we see fit.

Yesterday I gave a presentation entitled “Inside the PMI-ACP Exam” with PMI Certification manager Priya Sethuraman at the PMI-SAC Professional Development Conference. The session was designed to provide an overview of PMI certifications offerings, explain the positioning and development of the ACP exam, and dive deeper into the ACP domains and question types.

Yesterday was also notable for the PMI-ACP certification reaching 1732 credential holders, overtaking the PMI-RMP for the first time making it the most popular credential offered by the PMI behind the PMP and CAPM. Overtaking the Program (PgMP), Risk (PMI-RMP), and Scheduling (PMI-SP) certifications (all of which have been available for several years) within its first year of offering is a really encouraging start.

The slides from yesterday’s presentation can be downloaded below.

Download File: "Inside the PMI-ACP Exam - Slides"

Like many people, I am a design and architecture enthusiast. Last week I had the pleasure of giving a keynote presentation at the Nordic Project Zone Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Most of the attendees were from Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland) and the conference was hosted at a Scandic Hotel. I also met a number of presenters who consult in these countries as well as the US, India and the remainder of Europe. Amongst them there was a common consensus that Scandinavian countries adopt agile practices well, and there is a close alignment between agile values and prevailing cultural values.

I discussed this alignment a little with Thursara Wijewardena who was presenting on “Making Agile Work on Virtual, Physically Dispersed and Diverse Teams”, she commented that many Scandinavian companies have flat hierarchies and a high regard for employee respect/empowerment which fits well with the values agile aim to instil.

With it being my first visit to a Scandinavian capital, I was also impressed by the minimalist design approach apparent at our venue. “IKEA inspired” is the wrong term, since this was all high-end furniture and fixtures, but to anyone not familiar with Scandinavian design it helps capture the idea of the sleek, stripped to its core form and purpose style. To me it seemed no surprise that a culture used to pairing everything back to its minimal form, would take to agile that also looks to “maximize the work not done” and use “just enough” and “barely sufficient” documents and constructs.

The PMBOK v5 Guide draft text has been approved by the Consensus Body. This is the PMI appointed group of industry consultants, government representatives, and academics who vote on the final content, and they have reached agreement on the ultimate text to use. Some of the appendices are still being finalized, but the main text is complete and set.

My contributions were on chapter 6 and while I had submitted corrections and updates to the PMBOK Guide before, this was the first time I had worked on a Chapter Core Team. On the plus side it provides first kick at suggesting updates, but on the negative side you then have to reconcile the thousands of review feedback suggestions.

My hope was to get more agile content into the PMBOK v5 Guide since 65% of PMI membership work on IT projects and agile has penetrated the IT industry. This means for many readers the previous PMBOK Guide seemed oddly deficient in its coverage of common practices. We got some agile coverage included, but it was much smaller than I hoped for. Yet perhaps it opens the door for future expansion in later versions.

I am glad it is finished; it was a very large volunteer time commitment with many periods requiring 10-20hrs per week. As with any volunteer work, the cause, the people you “meet”(this was all remote work), and what you learn are the real rewards. The PMBOK v5 Guide will be available in January 2013 and will drive the update cycle of offerings like PMP Certification and associated PMI standards.

Linked below are my presentations from the Agile 2012 Conference in Grapevine, Texas. My slides are really just prompts and pictures to accompany the explanations and stories I tell , but if you were at the conference you will get the idea. For the longer “Collaborative Games for Risk Management” session I have also attached a full 20 page White Paper explaining agile risk management, and the games involved in more detail.  

Thanks to everyone who attended my presentations and, as ever, you are always welcome to contact me if you have an additional questions.

Download File: "Cowboys Presentation"

Download File: "Risk Slides"

Download File: "Collaborative Games for Agile Risk Management - White Paper"

This is the last post in a series on agile risk management. The first looked at the opportunities agile methods offer for proactive risk management, while the second examined the benefits of engaging the whole team in risk management through collaborative games. The last instalment walked through the first three games covering:

1. Risk management planning
2. Risk Identification
3. Qualitative Risk Analysis

This month we look at the final three sets of collaborative team activities that cover:

4. Quantitative Risk Analysis
5. Risk Response Planning (and Doing!)
6. Monitoring and Controlling Risks

The exercises we will examine are

• Today’s Forecast -- Quantitative Risk Analysis
  • Dragons’ Den -- next best dollar spent
  • Battle Bots -- simulations
• Backlog Injector -- Plan Risk Responses
  • Junction Function -- choose the risk response path
  • Dollar Balance -- Risk/Opportunity EVM to ROI comparison
  • Report Card -- Customer/Product owner engagement
  • Inoculator -- inject risk avoidance/mitigation and opportunity stories into backlog
• Risk Radar -- Monitoring and Controlling Risks
  • Risk Burn Down Graphs -- Tracking and monitoring
  • Risk Retrospectives -- Evaluating the effectiveness of the risk management plan
  • Rinse and Repeat -- Updating risk management artifacts, revisiting process

On Monday June 25th Calgary’s Agile Leadership Network meeting with feature Dr. Lionel Laroche presenting on “Working Effectively with Off-Shored IT Resources” the session is free, so come along if you can. The slides will be made available to those how cannot attend after the meeting at the Calgary Agile Leadership Network website

Presentation Outline:

"On paper, off-shoring IT work is a no-brainer – the salaries of programmers in India, Panama or Romania are a fraction of the salaries of programmers in Calgary. However, as most people who have worked with off-shored resources have learned, things are not as simple as they may seem, because managing off-shored resources is not the same as managing Canadian resources. Because people in different parts of the world think, communicate and behave differently in the same situations, projects that involve off-shored resources often experience significant difficulties, particularly at the beginning. This presentation examines the root causes of these difficulties and provides practical tips and suggestions that participants can readily implement when working with off-shored resources."

About the Speaker:

Over the past 14 years, Lionel has provided cross-cultural training, coaching and consulting services to over 25,000 people on four continents. Lionel specializes in helping organizations and professionals reach their business objectives in culturally unfamiliar contexts. In particular, he has worked with organizations like Sun Life, CP Rail, Fujitsu, PwC, CGI, AMD, Microsoft, Gennum, and many other overcome the challenges associated with working with off-shored resources and reap the corresponding benefits. Lionel is the author of two books, "Recruiting, Retaining and Promoting Culturally Different Employees" and "Managing Cultural Diversity in Technical Professions"; he and his business partner, Caroline Yang, are working on a third book entitled "Turning Cultural Diversity into a Competitive Advantage."

To register for this even click here. After the event the slides will be posted here.

Please join me on Wednesday May 2^nd for a free webinar on “PMI-ACP: Adopting Agile into the PMP World.” This is part of Rally Software’s webinar series and we already have >2,000 people signed up. The session runs on Wednesday May 2^nd at 7am (PT) / 10am (ET) and then again at 1pm (PT) / 4pm (ET) You can sign up here. 

In the webinar I will be talking to Juie Chikering about the exam’s content, who it is aimed at, it’s positioning in the industry, and how it has changed since the pilot last year, amongst other things. There will be interactive poles and questions from the audience, so it should be an interactive and informative event.

I will be presenting the webinar from the RallyOn Conference in Boulder, CO where I am also speaking about agile PMOs and on a panel with Dean Leffingwell, Johanna Rothman, and Alan Shalloway about the future of agile. I am really looking forward to it and also spending some more time in Boulder which I especially enjoy.

I picked up a copy of my PMI-ACP^SM Exam Prep book on a visit to RMC Project Management over the weekend. It was good to see it printed up for the first time, and with all the exercises and 120 sample exam questions, it was thicker than I expected at over 350 full-size pages.

The extra weight also comes from the case studies of agile projects I have worked on over the years and the additional materials I included to link the exam topics together. These items that are not in the exam are clearly marked so you can skip over them if you want. However, I am sure some people will find they add value by making the ideas more real. These additional materials also supply useful information to allow readers to fully understand the topics, rather than just memorize the information for the exam.

I am very grateful to the staff at RMC for pulling together my thoughts and ideas into this book, and for the people who reviewed it. Alistair Cockburn and Dennis Stevens were particularly helpful, and after reviewing it, they wrote the following quotes for the cover:

“As one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, I am delighted to see this book by Mike Griffiths. It is great that such an exam guide was prepared by someone with a deep understanding of both project management and Agile development. Personally, I hope that everyone reads this book, not just to pass the PMI-ACP exam, but to learn Agile development safely and effectively!”

– Dr. Alistair Cockburn, Manifesto for Agile Software Development Co-Author, International Consortium for Agile Co-Founder, and Current Member of the PMI-ACP Steering Committee.

“This is a VERY enjoyable book to read, due to Mike's firm grasp of the underlying concepts of Agile, and his articulate and entertaining writing style. My favorite part is the fact that it is organized into a framework that helps all of the Agile concepts hang together, so they will be easier to recall when taking the PMI-ACP exam.

But Mike's book is more than just the best PMI-ACP prep book out there. It is also the best consolidated source of Agile knowledge, tools, and techniques available today. Even if you are not planning on sitting for the PMI-ACP exam in the near future you need to buy this book, read it, and keep it as a reference for how to responsibly be Agile!”

– Dennis Stevens, PMI-ACP Steering Committee Member, PMI Agile Community of Practice Council Leader, and Partner at Leading Agile.

Thanks to you both, working with you over the years has been a blast. I would also like to thank the visitors of my blog here, too, for reading my posts and submitting insightful comments that kept me motivated to write. RMC has provided me a limited time promotion code that gives readers a further $10 off their currently discounted price for the book. If you follow this link and enter promo code “XTENMGBD”, you can get the additional $10 discount up until May 18th 2012. This is a 25% reduction on the retail price.

On Wednesday March 26 the Calgary Agile Leadership Network (CALN) is very pleased to welcome Steve Adolph from Rally Software.

Steve’s talk is related to his PhD thesis and focused on why smart hardworking people often fail to deliver on their commitments? He asks if there is something missing from our Agile training programs? Also, is something missing from our Agile practices? Steve will explain how part of the answer to these questions comes from the theory developed during his research and a course of action is offered for improving agile teams.

This promises to be a fun filled talk with tales from the airline industry and practical advice on why we need training on how to work together. Registration is free, please join is if you can, click here to reserve your place.

I finished my PMI-ACP Exam Preparation book a couple of weeks ago and now it is with the publishers for reviews and final edits. It turned out larger than expected, but I think better for the extra exercises and sample exam questions.

When designing the PMI-ACP^SM exam, we needed to base the content outline on existing books and resources so that candidates would understand what the exam would test them on. When choosing the books, we went back and forth on our decisions of which books to include, since there are so many good resources available. And while we recommend that people learn as much as they can, we also had to recognize the need for keeping the exam content—and the preparation process for the exam—reasonable. In the end, we selected the following 11 books:

1.    Agile Estimating and Planning, by Mike Cohn
2.   Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products, Second Edition, by Jim Highsmith
   
3.   Agile Project Management with Scrum, by Ken Schwaber
   
4.   Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen
   
5.   Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game, Second Edition, by Alistair Cockburn
   
6.   Becoming Agile: ...in an Imperfect World, by Greg Smith and Ahmed Sidky
   
7.   Coaching Agile Teams, by Lyssa Adkins
   
8.   Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility, by Alan Shalloway, Guy Beaver, and James R. Trott
   
9.   The Software Project Manager’s Bridge to Agility, by Michele Sliger and Stacia Broderick
   
10.   The Art of Agile Development, by James Shore and Shane Warden
    
11.   User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development, by Mike Cohn

Reading all of these books takes some time, since the 11 books add up to more than 4,000 pages. The books also cover a lot more material than you need to know for the exam. From each book, we extracted the portions that best covered the exam content outline topics, and the exam questions were then targeted at those specific sections.

I am overdue for providing an update on how my work on The PMBOK v5 Guide is going. Well, it is on its way. The process is slow (sometimes painfully slow) but this is because of the number of people involved and the review process used. To give an idea, here is the plan for the next 6 months:

*  17 February – 20 March 2012: the exposure draft PMBOK® Guide – Fifth Edition will be open for comments

*  Late February 2012: team training for our adjudication processes

*  20 March 2012: our exposure draft period closes and comment adjudication begins

*  20 March – 28 April 2012: teams adjudicate exposure draft comments 

*  Early May – mid May 2012: core committee reconciles any comment adjudications that cut across chapters or where consensus has not yet been obtained

*  Mid May – early June 2012: appeals period for adjudication decisions; final draft QC and integration reviews

*  Early June – mid June 2012: appeals adjudication and resolution

*  Mid June – late June 2012: final draft cleanup and incorporation of QC comments

*  28 June 2012: core committee vote on finalized draft

The Exposure Draft process is a great mechanism for allowing members to review and comment on new material, but likely to generate a ton of review work for us. The Fourth Edition update, back in 2008 received over 4,400 comments during its exposure draft.  Since the membership of the PMI has increased significantly since 2008 we could be looking at close to double that figure.

That is a lot of suggested changes to review and I think March and April will be a busy time for me. Of course they will not arrive in one Word document, but I wonder what the PMBOK Guide would look like if we just did an “Accept All”? Right now it is the calm before the storm; I am going to make the most of it.

SMEs, SM0s and the Deluded Developer Day

We all want Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), but what happens if we get a Subject Matter Zeros (SM0s)?  How does that impact your schedule, and what about team members who have “other project commitments”? Before you know it, that 6 month schedule that looked pretty comfortable, is looking like a fairy tale.

I recently attended a great presentation by Lee Lambert at my local PMI conference and while he was not talking about agile per say, his commentary on SMEs and part time resources struck a chord, which I would like to share.

The role of the customer, the business, the Subject Matter Expert (SME) on agile projects is vital. They not only help provide requirements, but also clarify details, validate prototypes, perform UAT, tell us about business changes, articulate the goal, prioritize, the list goes on. Great SMEs are like great multi-disciplined developers who can do BA work, architecture, development, and QA – they can just make projects happen. It is rare to get these mythical beings, but I have been fortunate to work with a few.

More commonly we work with SMEs with limited time who have a preference for one or two areas of work, such as providing requirements or testing increments of software. We obviously want the best SMEs we can get, but the best people are always busy since they “get-it” and can crank out work – so who wouldn’t want to engage them?

When SMEs are not available we can assign proxy customers, where perhaps a BA plays the role of the customer, or we get someone more junior from the business who may be less experienced in the role than ideal. These are just the realities of working in companies today and as the Rolling Stones said, “You can't always get what you want, But if you try sometimes you just might find, You get what you need”. When this happens we just need to be sure we understand the consequences to our schedule.

The other factor is team member availability, ideally this is 100%. This makes face-to-face meetings easy, resource leveling a breeze, and a one day task often does actually get done in one day, imagine that! “You, you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one”, many project schedules are planned this way even when commitments for support and other projects take availability from the project.

Overall Task Duration is dictated by the productivity of our resources along with their availability, as follows:
So if a task was estimated at 8 hours (one day) for our SME & Dev combo, but we did not get the SME we wanted and instead got a SM0 who, lets optimistically assume is 50% as productive as our SME. Also the developer is not 100% committed to the team, but split across 2 projects and also providing production support for those projects, then their true availability for new development on our project might be only 25%.

Using these figures for our 8 hour task we get: 
This result can be surprising, we instinctively knew it would take longer since the business involvement was not perfect and the developer had other work, most PMs factor in 3-4 times longer, maybe 5-6 times, but it is rare for the full 8 times longer to be properly incorporated.

This is why ideas like Yesterday’s Weather (gauging performance based on previous results) and measuring team capacity via Velocity are often better predictors of completion rates.  The other point it illustrates is the impact and significance of suboptimal resources and non-dedicated participants.

As always the best time to influence project durations and success factors is when selecting the people for the project. It is a too easy to overlook the true impact of a few small compromises and not properly explain the consequences that then accumulate to make projects late. We can use the Task Duration formula to illustrate this or rely on the Beatles “Help, I need somebody; Help, not just anybody, Help…”.

 

Bio: Mike Griffiths is a project manager who seriously needs to update his music collection. He has served on the board of the Agile Alliance and the APLN. Mike is a contributor to the PMBOK v5 Guide, the Software Extension to the PMBOK Guide, the PMI Agile CoP, and the PMI-ACP Steering Committees.

 This post first appeared in Gantthead.com here.

I will be presenting on “Smart Agile Metrics” at the upcoming Calgary Agile Methods User Group (CAMUG) meeting Tuesday January 10th.

Here is the outline:

“Collecting and reporting effective metrics can be a tricky business. Einstein captured it well when he noted "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted".

Software projects have a history of measuring irrelevant and even counter-productive progress tracking metrics. The "Hawthorne Effect" should teach us that we will influence what we measure, yet companies continue to overtly track things like hours worked and lines of code written, unaware that they send the message of valuing long hours over results, and discourage simplifications and healthy refactoring. Quite often the metrics we want to track are intangible and subjective and so people tend to shy away from them.

More fundamentally, why are we even tracking these metrics? Is it to report on what has already occurred or help steer our future course? Often an imperfect view of the future is more useful than a perfect view of the past. The accuracy of hind-sight and our attraction to certainty often creates too much of an emphasis on lagging, already occurred measurements compared to leading metrics. So we get fancy graphs of project spend and defect rates, but no better insights into what we should be doing differently in order to meet our goal.

In this presentation I will review many common project metrics and explain why they are largely misguided and counter productive. An alternative set of "Design Factory" metrics will be presented that are "simple and relevant to the true project goal", these metrics leverage the Hawthorne effect and focus on leading metrics to support smarter decision making.”

This is a favourite talk of mine that I presented many times, just never for CAMUG before. I have written this post on some of the concepts in the talk. The event is free to attend and hosted at the University of Calgary. I am looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and meeting some new people too, I hope you can make it along if you are in the area.

Location:  ICT Building Room 121
Time:       6:00-6:30pm Snacks,
                6:30-7:30pm Presentation

CAMUG Website

I am currently in Miami at the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner Steering Committee Meeting. We have been reviewing the pilot program that just wrapped up and discussing proposed changes for the full program when it gets rolled out next year.

The pilot has been a success with 7,654 applications being opened which far exceeds other PMI specialized certifications offered to date. These came from 114 countries with the top 10 by volume being:

1. US
2. India
3. Canada
4. Brazil
5. UK
6. Australia
7. Sweden
8. Germany
9. Singapore
10. Switzerland

Overall 75% were already paid PMI members, and 70% were PMP credential holders.



Some of the changes we discussed (that are not approved yet) including extending the agile project experience qualification period from 2 years to 4years, change some of the questions from “Hows?” (e.g. NPV, IRR) to “Whys?” and tone down the software references.

Other work that will occur between now and when the certification gets reopened in January 2012 will include scoring the questions from the pilot. Questions that had a statistically higher set of people getting them wrong will be examined. As too will questions that people who otherwise did well on the test, seemed to struggle with. These poor performing questions will be swapped out with new ones and augmented by the new questions now coming out of the second round of question writing.

As always the best part has been catching up with everyone, always worth the journey.

I have uploaded the slides from my “Agile PMO” presentation and they can be accessed from the link below . I presented them last week at the Calgary APLN meeting and this week at the PMI-SAC Professional Development Conference. My session was well attended and I received good feedback; some of the slides are pretty sparse and really just visual reminders for me to tell a story about something. In the upcoming weeks I hope to post some more thoughts on the topic.

At the conference I attended some great sessions by Ed Merrow, Lee Lambert, and Jeremy Gutsche amongst others, that inspired some new directions of learning that I hope to write about too. Unfortunately release demos, and 2012 road-mapping sessions at my day job preventing me attending all the sessions I would have liked, but the event was very worthwhile.

Download The Agile PMO

On Wednesday Nov. 16th I will be presenting on how “PMOs often Present Multiple Obstacles for agile projects yet can also Provide Many Opportunities”. This is for our local A(P)LN chapter and is a dry run for next week when I am presenting it at the PMI-SAC Conference. Anyone who is around Calgary this Wednesday is welcome to attend this free event. Please just register in advance so we know how many drinks to plan for.

In the presentation we will explore:
•    What is a PMO supposed to do anyway?
•    How agile projects are often a misfit for PMOs
•    A different kind of Game Theory to illustrate how PMOs can help
•    Characteristics of an agile aligned PMO
•    What are today’s PMO challenges?
•    A case study for an award winning agile PMO
•    Tomorrow’s PMO challenges and opportunities

I am looking forward to seeing some old friends and meeting some new members too, I hope you can make it along.

What is project success? Is it just on time, on budget, with required functionality, and to a high quality standard? Or is there more, some missing X factor, a good after-taste, or resonance that we just know is great?

I did some training for a client recently who is interested in measuring project success. The traditional constraint measures of on budget, on schedule, happy stakeholders were not cutting it for him. They were missing this unknown element he was really more keen to measure. We talked about other measures of success including how people feel about the project and the act of leaving a valuable legacy.

There are plenty of examples of projects that might be judged failures by the constraint measures of on budget, on schedule, etc, but successes in terms of how people felt about them and the act of leaving a legacy. They include the Apollo 13 mission, the Titanic Movie, Shackleton and the Endurance, and the Iridium Satellite Network. I wrote about how these “failed” by constraint measures were successes by other measures in a post a couple of years ago.

This still was not satisfactory and these measures were often only apparent long after the project was done. They were too late and retroactive, my client wanted something he could use right now to get a better handle on projects. It turns out what he was looking for might be better explained by Actor Networks with Convergent and Divergent behaviour, (but I did not know that then, so back to the story.)

Bothered by not fully answering his question, I attended the Agile on The Beach conference in Cornwall, UK. I flew into London, where I worked in the 1990’s at Canary Wharf and saw the Millennium Dome being built. Seen in films such as James Bond: The World is Not Enough, the Millennium Dome project that, while on schedule, has been widely labeled as a failure. The white elephant that hardly anyone wanted, and struggled to attract or please visitors. I was even a little surprised to see it was still there, since I knew it had been left empty for a while, used as a temporary homeless shelter, and other things.
 

The Calgary Agile Project Leadership Network (Calgary APLN) 20011/2012 season kicks off with a social at the Barley Mill in Eau Claire, Thursday Oct 5, 4:00 – 6:00pm.

"To help build a vibrant Agile community in Calgary, we would like to invite you to a networking event. Come out and meet other Agile Leaders within Calgary, swap stories and share some laughs. Agile Recruiting has graciously sponsored the event by providing appetizers. Cash bar will be available.”

This is a great opportunity to meet and chat to other people in the agile project leadership community in Calgary. We have a limited capacity so register to reserve a place. I hope to see you there.

I have been away attending the excellent “Agile on The Beach” conference recently, but when I returned I had an email waiting requesting some PMI-ACP study help on Value Stream Mapping. So here is quick outline of the topic.

Value Stream Mapping – is a lean manufacturing technique that has been adopted by agile methods. It is used to analyze the flow of information (or materials) required to complete a process and to determine elements of waste that may be removed to improve the efficiency of the process. Value stream mapping usually involves creating visual maps of the process (value stream maps) and progresses through these stages:
1)    Identify the product or service that you are analyzing
2)    Create a value stream map of the currant process identifying steps, queues, delays and information flows
3)    Review the map to find delays, waste and constraints
4)    Create a new value stream map of the future state optimized to remove/reduce delays, waste and constraints
5)    Develop a roadmap to create the future state
6)    Plan to revisit the process in the future to continually tune and optimize

To illustrate lets optimize the value stream for buying a cake to celebrate passing your PMI-ACP exam with a friend. Let’s say this involves choosing a cake, waiting at the bakery counter to get the cake, paying for the cake at the checkout, then unpacking and slicing before enjoying the benefit of the process (the cake).

I am excited to announce I will be working with RMC to create a PMI-ACP Study Guide book for the upcoming PMI Agile Certified Practitioner exam. When I was studying for my PMP exam many years ago, I used Rita Mulcahy’s PMP Prep Study Guide and was very grateful for the plain English explanations, exam guidance, and sample questions. So it feels right and a bit of a privilege to be working with the same company to help guide people for this new exam.

Working with the other PMI-ACP Steering Committee members over the last couple of years on the Agile Community of Practice and to define the exam has been a great experience, but the hundreds of hours of unpaid volunteer time has to be made up somewhere so hopefully this endeavor will help out. Assuming people still buy books that is, I read this Guardian article today that made me wonder. Anyway, embracing today’s publishing ideas; I will be posting snippets here for anyone looking for taster portions. The big picture views, sample exam questions, and cheat sheets will be kept for the main book, but key concepts around the tools and techniques, knowledge and skill areas will be posted here.

I would love to hear your feedback on these portions, please let me know if they are useful, need more explanation, or you think I am missing anything. I can then develop additional material to improve the final product. To help collect all my PMI-ACP content together (and exclude it for those of you not interested) I have created a Category tag called “PMI-ACP” and you can use the Categories filter under “Recent Posts” in the right hand navigation on my LeadingAnswers.com home page to find content.

♫ It is summertime, my posts are short, the days are long
Caught somewhere between work and play
(This blog just is not getting written in between)
It is summertime in North America! ♫

Summer in the Canadian Rockies is short and busy for me, I spend more time mountain biking and hiking than working, so not much gets posted here on my blog. To help fill the void I will be posting a couple of articles I wrote for Gantthead earlier this year. So unless you are an avid Gantthead reader, these articles should be new to you. Normal postings will resume at the end of summer here, i.e. much too soon.

Here is an update on the agile happenings at the PMI that I have been involved with. The pilot program for the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner filled up fast. 2,649 people opened applications for the program, a record for the PMI, and the full launch in October is looking like it will be very popular. Item writing for the exam questions is on track and Registered Education Providers (REPs) are in high-gear readying their courses.

The PMBOK v5 Guide continues to move forward too. My work is on Chapter 6 (Time Management) and we recently reviewed and incorporated the second round of approved comments. There was a meeting this weekend to review all chapter comments along with the updated Inputs, Tools, Techniques, and Outputs (ITTOs). I have suggested some agile content I am not able to discuss under the NDA, but I am hopeful it will survive the approval process. Other Chapters have agile content being suggested too. This is a slow process though and the PMBOK v5 Guide is not expected until late 2012.

I was also recently contacted about working on an Software Extension to the PMBOK Guide. This really excites me and is something I looked into leading a few years back (before I discovered the full extent of the work involved). There has been a call for Agile experts to help develop the new extension.

If you have ever looked through the Extension to the PMBOK Guide for Construction, you will know that the extension does more than add a bunch of industry related practices. It also suggests changes to the existing PMBOK’s outlines. So, for instance, instead of creating a detailed WBS, we could suggest creating a candidate feature backlog. Many of the suggestions for change to the PMBOK Guide have to be tempered with the fact that the guide has to remain industry agnostic and suitable for any project manager. An extension for the Software Industry allows us to go much deeper into agile techniques. I am looking forward to this work and learning who else is involved.

Finally the PMI Agile Community of Practice continues to grow and develop. I learned that Michele Sliger’s recent webinar had over 500 people in attendance. This is great and a sign of the levels of interest for agile present in the ever expanding PMI community. Taking agile to the PMI that used to have this “evil empire” feel felt audacious eightr years ago, now it seems natural and if anything, belated. People have strong opinions and the PMBOK Guide work has shown me that many people still dismiss agile methods, but it feels like the tide is coming in and neither King Cnute or the diehard traditionalists will stop it.

The 2011 Agile conference goes back to its roots this year, returning to Utah 10 years after the creation of the Agile Manifesto there in 2001. I won’t be there this year, since I’ll be taking advantage of Canada’s short summer to take part in the TransRockies mountain bike race.I was disappointed to be missing out on the conference, but am more excited by this multi day race through my backyard mountains.

Then, last week I heard of some other agile events that I can attend. The DSDM consortium is holding Agile roadshows in Cambridge and Newcastle. It will be great to catch up with Steve Messenger and others from Napp Pharmaceutical. Then there is “Agile on the Beach” happening in Cornwall, where I grew up, this September. So for me this year, I will not be joining my usual North American agile friends for their back to their roots conference, but will be embarking on my own back to my roots agile conference tour. Likely lower key, but I always manage to learn something new and make some good connections.

It turns out the original suggestion of “Agile Project Practitioner” (PMI-APP) was too close to “App.” as in an Application or phone app to easily trademark (in this case service mark). So the name will now be “Agile Certified Practitioner” ACP as in Fred Blogs, PMP, ACP.

The timeline for people wanting to apply will be:
•    May 23rd    - Launch of application to Public
•    Mid July    - Pilot Participants can schedule exams at Prometric test centres
•    September 15    - Pilot Program Testing begins
•    November 30    - Pilot Program Testing Concludes
•    January 1    - First set of individuals that passed the exam are notified.

I am getting lots of questions about the content of the exam, so I thought I would present a couple of ways of interpreting it. In my last post on this subject I showed the box model for reconciling the Domains with the Knowledge & Skills (KS), and Tools & Techniques (TT).

Here is a version with the KS and TT’s listed:

 
(click on any of the images above or on the continuation page to see a bigger version)

"Calling Hallelujah Always Offends Someone"

I am glad the PMI is finally recognizing agile methods, Ken Schwaber recently posted about the PMI Agile Certification, saying that he “…welcomes this and looks forward to PMI shifting from its previous approach to an agile approach. The test of this will be, of course, the success of the projects that adhere to its principles. In the past, the success (or yield) of their predictive approach has been less than 50% of projects (on time, on date, with the desired functionality.)”

He was quoting from the Standish CHAOS Report that comes out every couple of years and documents the success and failure rates of IT projects. The CHAOS reports have been published since 1994, the same year DSDM appeared and when many agile methods were getting going. Each year the results vary slightly, but the general theme is that many IT projects are challenged and results like the following are typical:

    * 32%   Successful (On Time, On Budget, Fully Functional)
    * 44%   Challenged (Late, Over Budget, And/Or Less than Promised Functionality)
    * 24%   Failed (Cancelled or never used)
    * 61%   Feature complete

It is interesting then that Ken attributes the poor success rates of IT projects since the start of agile to be a PMI problem. You would think that with the rise of agile methods and the success of all these Scrum, XP, FDD, and DSDM projects we hear about, that these statistics would have turned right around!

The PMI has now published the Agile Certification Examination Content Outline, you can download it here. It outlines the “Tools and Techniques” and “Knowledge and Skills” areas that the exam will be broken into. As we have it now, 50% of the examination marks will be awarded for Tools and Techniques and 50% for Knowledge and Skills.

 

As part of the Steering Committee it was interesting to take part the discussions around these weightings. As recent as a month ago the split being suggested for the exam weighting was 70% of the exam would be based on Tools and Techniques with just 30% on Knowledge and Skills. We had steering committee members suggest a 60, 40% split the other way, but in the end the 50%, 50% split was selected.

       

Doubtless people are reading through these categories trying to get a handle on the scope of the exam. My recommendation would be to focus less on these divisions (that overlap anyway) and focus on the domains that underpin them.

As an example we see Knowledge and Skills Level 1 mentions “Building Empowered Teams”,  Level 2 has “Building High Performance Teams”, and the Tools and Techniques section has items for “Communications” including “daily stand-ups”  and “collaboration”. These are obviously all closely related, but listed in separate areas which could be confusing,  but if you adjust your view to focus on the domains, there is a better separation into logical areas.

 
I am hoping that there will be a reissue of the Examination Content Outline, since the current form needs word-smithing. The text we generated for it was our short hand notes. For instance Domain 1 Task 1 reads:

“Define features and project work in terms of end-user and stakeholder value by focusing on maximizing value delivered and minimizing non-value-added activities in order to keep the delivery team focused on maximizing the value developed.” Is quite the mouthful that made sense to us, but could perhaps be restated along the lines of:

“Define project features and work items in terms of end-user and stakeholder value, by always looking for and clarifying the business value. Focusing on maximizing value delivered by the project and try to eliminate any non-value-added activities. This keeps the delivery team focused on maximizing the business value and reduces the likelihood of wasteful activities, feature bloat and gold-plating.” While this is longer, hopefully it is in easier to absorb chunks.

Anyway, as the categories evolve and the questions get developed I will keep readers updated here.

The PMI employs a Continuing Certification Requirements (CCR) program to encourage members to keep their skills and knowledge up to date. This basically means that to maintain your certification (be it PMP, CAPM, or PgMP) you have to meet the ongoing requirement for Professional Development Units (PDUs).


Money For Nothing
To some people this is viewed as a money grab, like selling you a cheap inkjet printer and then holding you to ransom on ink cartridges. You are now on the hook for continually paying to renew that credential you worked so hard to obtain, or lose it.

So every three years you have to prove you have taken enough courses and attended enough local meetings (both of which the PMI can happily provide to you for a fee) to ensure those valuable credentials stay on your resume.


Psst, it’s 2011, Things Have Changed!
Actually, while the picture just painted is the mindset shared by many project managers, it is out of date and severely limited. Starting March 1st, 2011 the PMI broadened the eligibility of qualifying activities and simplified the categories for PDU claims. Also, the CCR program is as much about encouraging members to give back to the PM profession as it is to learning, so your options may be much wider than you think.

For the budget conscious of you out there (and let’s face it you are here partly because the content is free) there are plenty of ways of fulfilling your 60 PDUs within a three year cycle that costs no money. Yep, all your PDU’s for free!

Malcolm Gladwell (author of Blink and Tipping Point) was in town a couple of weeks ago and I enjoyed a great presentation he gave on what happens when we think we have complete information on a subject.

The Problem
Gladwell asserts that the global economic crisis was largely caused by “Miscalibration Errors”. These are errors made by leaders who become over confident due to reliance on information. Those in charge of the major banks were smart, professional, and respected people at the top of their game; who, as it turns out, are prime candidates from miscalibration errors.

People who are incompetent make frequent, largely unimportant errors, and that is understandable. They are largely unimportant errors because people who are incompetent rarely get into positions of power. Yet those who are highly competent are susceptible to rare, but hugely significant errors. 

Think of the global economic crisis where bank CEOs were seemingly in denial of the impending collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market. (I don’t mean close to the end when they were secretly betting against the market while still recommending products to their clients, but earlier on when they were happy to bet their own firms on “AAA” rated derivatives that they knew were really just a collection of highly suspect subprime mortgages.)

Anyway, this phenomenon of educated, well informed leaders making rare, but catastrophic errors is not new and unlikely to go away soon, it seems to be a baked-in human flaw. When presented with increasing levels of information our perception of judgement accuracy increases when in reality their judgement may be very suspect. Let’s look at some examples:

It has been a busy week for PMI Agile work. Last week I was in San Antonio with the PMI Agile Certification Steering Committee reviewing the latest market research and next steps for the certification launch. Things are also moving forward on the PMBOK v5 Guide with some more agile terms defined and content suggested for Chapter 6.

The PMI recently sent a detailed Agile survey out to a sample of its members and received feedback from >1,300 people. They were looking for feedback on the types of project managers using agile and their adoption of the domains and knowledge areas that comprise the Domains and Knowledge & Skills that will be in the exam.

Nearly 60% of the respondents were from the US with Canada, India, and Brazil being the next most popular. Not surprisingly the biggest industry sector was in IT, with Finance and Consulting being well represented. Most had 2 or more years’ agile experience and had participated in 4 projects or more in a leadership role. 80% held PMP certifications and nearly 30% CSM certifications.

One of the aims of the survey was to ask for rankings of the Techniques, Tools, Knowledge and Skills that will form the body of knowledge  that the exam is based upon. I would love to share these categories here but have been asked not to until after the official release on April 15th. This is understandable, and only fair, but once they are publicized I will have plenty to say about them.

I am sure the 1500 or so PMI Registered Education Providers  (REPs) along the Scrum CST’s who will be offering exam preparation courses will be having a busy Spring and Summer.

Meanwhile on the PMBOK v5 Guide, each of the chapter teams are busy completing the initial chapter re-writes ahead of integration and review. I have been surprised at the rigour and constraints imposed on the writing. Due to the guide being translated into a dozen languages, readability and consistency is key. As, for instance, on our latest effort one PMI reviewer commented that the Microsoft Word 2007 Readability Statistics show a Flesch Reading Ease score of 26.6, which is considered to be "very confusing" and "not easily understood by college graduates". A score between 60 and 70 is largely considered acceptable. So we have rewritten chunks and tried to simplify.

The increased accommodation of agile content is great, not just in my chapter, but I am  hearing  about agile content for the other chapters too. When the call for feedback goes out we will get to see what has been incorporated. I will publicize it here and encourage people to review the new PMBOK v5 Guide for agile content and suggest where more can be added – if appropriate.

That’s the update for now, stay tuned for more on the certification categories after the PMI reveal. Rest assured since we had a great mix of Agile Manifesto authors, PM experts, and pragmatic agilists working on it I don’t think people will be disappointed.

The new PMI Agile certification will come on stream in two waves. The first is the pilot program starting in May where participants get the chance to sit the 120 question, multiple choice, 3 hr exam and instead of pressing the dreaded “Submit” button at the end, they will be advised 10-12 weeks later. This long wait is to allow the PMI to score everyone in the pilot and then calibrate the cut-off scores.

For enduring the wait, and I guess being guinea pigs in the process, pilot participants will receive a 20% refund on the exam fee bringing the cost to members of $435 down to $348. To qualify to sit the exam participants must satisfy the following criteria:

• High school or equivalent education
• 2,000 hours general project management experience within the last 5 years (if you already hold a PMP you can forget this since you had to prove that for your PMP)
• 1,500 hours agile project management experience working on agile project teams or in agile methodologies within the last 2 years. These hours are in addition to the 2,000 hours required in general project management experience
• 21 hours agile project management training

 

The full certification program will be publically available in the third quarter of 2011. To maintain the credential you must earn 30 PDUs every 3 years in agile project management and these hours would also count toward fulfilling PMP requirements.

 

The PMI took the wraps off their new PMI Agile Certification program today. If that sounds like an oxymoron then take a closer look. There have been a growing number of agile sessions at PMI conferences over the last 6 years and an entire agile track at the last PMI Global Congress. The PMI reports that 65% of its members are involved in IT projects and Gartner are predicting agile will be used by 80% of software projects by 2012, so the demand is huge. My PMI SeminarsWorld course is popular not because anyone wants to see me, but instead the demand is high for information on how to run agile projects within PMI based organizations.

I have been working with the PMI on the program for about 18 months now, but muffled under NDA contracts so it is nice for it to be out in the open. Doubtless there will be criticism against the whole idea of certification and then again about an agile certification from the PMI. I thought long and hard before agreeing to participate, but then committed enthusiastically. Two things were clear to me.

1. The PMI had a big elephant in the room. Many IT projects were using agile methods and project managers were offered little guidance from the PMI on how to incorporate such endeavours.
2. The PMI were committed to providing a knowledge base, training options, and a certification program with or without me. If it was going to happen anyway, I wanted to be on the inside trying to steer it in the right direction rather than on the outside wondering if it might suddenly take a left turn.

Fortunately others felt the same way and the core team of steering committee has a wealth of grass roots agile knowledge. With Agile Manifesto authors and industry experts, we have a great pool of agile knowledge feeding into the design. Plus for some of us it was not the first go round of defining an agile project management certification. Mike Cottmeyer  and myself were engaged on the APLN effort that morphed into the DSDM program and is now quite popular in the UK. The PMI-APP materials, training and certification will provide people with vetted information based on practices found to work in these hybrid environments.

While the routes taken by agile and PMBOK methods can appear very different to the lay person (explore and validate versus plan, plan, plan) both approaches have the same ultimate destination of successful projects and satisfied stakeholders. Tools and techniques that help determine the appropriate level of planning and introduce agile team benefits are vital tools for today’s project manager’s toolbox.

While certifications do not assure competence or capability to manage projects, they are a useful learning tool for people new to the domain. In this role I welcome the certification for the training and awareness it will bring to this important and expanding field.

I am especially pleased by the quality of the agile thought leaders engaged in the design and evolution of the program. By having expert contributors from the agile field, the risk of misapplication by the uninitiated, or rejection by the agile community should be reduced (but not eliminated).

So for me it is not so much about the certification, but hopefully the training materials, studying and increased awareness of successful adoption strategies it should bring. 

What do you think? I would love you hear your thoughts…

The next occurrence of my Agile Project Management class will be in New Orleans on February 28 and March 1st (Feb 18 Update: and is now full ). After that there is:

Savannah, GA - April 11, 12
Dallas, TX  - October 26, 27
Anaheim, CA - November 7,8

I enjoy delivering these courses and people enjoy attending them too, here are some feedback comments:

"Mike delivers an exceptionally well reasoned and effective presentation of agile. Thoroughly appreciated" - Bill Palace, El Sugund, CA
“The best PMI class I have ever taken.” - Scott Hall, Marriot International
"This was a very well executed course. Instructor (Mike Griffiths) was very engaging!" – Ameila White, Boeing
"The instructor was very knowledgeable, class well organized, content at the right level of detail and very comprehensive. One of the best classes I have taken regarding PM topics" – James Bernard, Scottsdale
"Excellent course with great information" – Tom Gehret, JNJ Vision Care
"Excellent facilitator. Mike is respectful and knowledgeable" - Nghiem Pauline, San Diego, CA
"The course was fantastic " - Kimberly Kehoe, San Diego, CA
"Mike is an excellent instructor and I really appreciated his organized and clear, well researched presentation. His domain and project management experience is evident from his talk. Also I appreciate his exposure/experience to multiple approaches like PRINCE2, PMBOK, Scrum, DSDM etc." - Sarah Harris, OpenText
"Great content and delivery" – Andrea Williams, Fed Ex
"Great Stuff!, Really enjoyed instructor and real-world examples" - Don Brusasco, Northridge, CA
"The instructor did an excellent job of keeping the pace, - clearly explaining topics and providing practical applications" - Cathy MacKinnon, Schering Plough Corp
"Excellent!" – Peter Colquohoun, Australian Defence

All of these classes sold out last year so if you want to attend I suggest you book early; I hope to see you in New Orleans!

So we had our Agile Mythbusters session and it went really well. I was a little concerned that we would present a myth to the audience and there would be no discussion, debate or dialogue, just crickets chirping and tumbleweed rolling through. However, as normal, people were great and we had some good explanation and analysis of the myths.

After a warm up round debating the likelihood of the Calgary Flames making the playoffs (currently theoretically “Plausible”) we got started with “You cannot accurately estimate agile projects”. There was a good discussion about how we estimate agile projects and how in fact the feedback from iterations provides concrete evidence for better estimating. Yet the larger issues with accurately estimating something as intangible as software were highlighted.

We talked about if you changed the phrase from “You cannot accurately estimate agile projects” to “You cannot accurately estimate software projects” people were happier to label it as “Confirmed” so the debate was really about if agile software projects are easier or more difficult to estimate than traditional projects. Anyway, after nearly 30 minutes on the first agile myth we wanted to move on, so we labelled this one "Confirmed" and continued.

“Agile will increase Quality” was the next one and we had some frank discussion about the poor quality agile projects that occur. Like many things “it depends” was the consensus. Clearly there are opportunities for improved quality, but often a lack of discipline prevents these opportunities from occurring. So in the end “Agile will increase Quality” was labelled  “Plausible”.

Next up was “Since empowered teams self organize and self-select work, the role of the project manager goes away”.  This one was not contentious and several useful lists of project manager roles were generated. Our most unanimous myth decision, “… the role of the PM goes away” was "Busted".

The last myth we debated was “It is very difficult to negotiate contracts for agile work”.  This triggered some interesting accounts of contracting and the goals of suppliers and buyers. Many people struggle with agile contracting and are not aware of all the work done in this field. I was looking for a topic for this month’s “Agility Now” newsletter at Gantthead.com so I wrote up an account of agile contracting that may be of interest if this is an issue for you.

Anyway, it was a fun session and thanks to Mike Haden and Janice Aston for facilitating.

I like myths and have written on Leadership Myths previoulsy. For our next Calgary APLN Meeting we are hosting an Agile Mythbusters discussion. The idea being to debate some agile myths and through group discussion determine if they are Busted, Confirmed, or Plausible.

Now, likely an APLN audience might have a little bias, since the “A” in APLN stands for "Agile", but I hope that since we have cross posted the invitation to the local PMI group we might even things out.

Through my teaching for the PMI I get to hear many questions and rebuttals to agile’s claims and I think it is good to question benefits and have an honest reality check from time to time. Some of the myths proposed for discussion so far include:

•    You cannot accurately estimate agile projects
•    Agile methods promote scope creep
•    It is very difficult to negotiate contracts for agile work
•    Agile projects cannot be tracked with earned value
•    Agile projects employ counter intuitive planning practices
•    Stage gates don't work for agile projects
•    Agile methods avoid accountability
•    Agile projects are cheaper
•    Without specifications you do not know when you are done
•    You would not allow a housing contractor to proceed without a clear plan and estimate, why develop SW this way?
•    Agile scales naturally
•    Agile teams are happier
•    Since empowered teams self-organize and self-select work, the role of the project manager goes away
•    Agile methods erode the gains made towards recognizing SW development as a serious engineering discipline
•    Agile methods ignore enterprise architecture
•    Agile is quicker


Please send me your own agile myths for us to discuss. We will be choosing 5-6 to run through at the meeting. If you are in Calgary on January 26 please join us for the session. Registration details here at the Calgary APLN site.

If you cannot make it in person, I will write up some findings and publish them here later.

LeadingAnswers recently placed 8th in the Top 50 Leadership blogs list, rated by The Entrepreneur Blog. This was a great surprise and I did not even know it was nominated for reader voting. First and second spots went to Seth Godin and Daniel Pink so I am honoured to be listed in this kind of company.

Many of the other sites were new to me and I am guessing new to you also, check out the full list and maybe discover some other sources of leadership information.

This was a regional competition, not the national one, but I am really pleased to report that the IPS project I managed for the last 3+ years won the PMI-SAC Business & IT “Project of the Year” award at last week’s PMI Gala and Conference.

The Integrated Pipeline Solution (IPS) manages about a third of Canada’s heavy oil transportation. While you may think tracking oil moving through a pipeline sounds pretty simple, like anything, the devil is in the details. Husky has about 30,000km of pipeline and complications such as blending products, forecasting production, optimizing capacity, custody transfers, billing, accruals, etc and the fact that billions of dollars are at stake mean that the rules, regulations and complexity adds up pretty quickly.

We had an amazing team and engaged, savvy business representatives – these were the real reasons for success, not the methods we followed. However, there were lots of challenges too and our approach helped us here. We “inherited” the project $1.1M behind budget after an outsourced vendor doubled their estimate following a year of analysis. They were asked to leave and the project was brought in-house, but with no adjustment to the original budget.

Agile methods excel at fixed budget projects providing the sponsor is willing to flex functionality. This is what occurred and we actually ended up delivering more functionality that originally scoped within the initial budget.

The PMI Awards assess projects on a variety of criteria and asks for submissions in a specific 10 page format. I will spare you the 10 page version and instead list a quick summary of the benefits:

• Enhanced Business and IT relations – against a backdrop of varying degrees of business / IT co-operation, the project stood out as an example of completing a long and challenging project through close cooperation. The stakeholders were practical and pragmatic about decision making and priorities. The increased trust built on this project has been useful for launching subsequent projects.

• Business Benefits – the business benefits of creating a single, integrated pipeline system are numerous. User configurable calculations, better data quality, faster calculation speeds, and improved reporting are just some of the tangible benefits.

• Improved resilience and support – The IPS project moved the Pipeline group from a set of unsupported, legacy systems to a new platform of state of the art .Net and Oracle 11g solutions. User developed spreadsheets with questionable data integrity were also replaced.

• Project Objectives met – The project delivered all the requested functionality within the defined project schedule. This functionality was delivered to a very high level of quality, and while there have been some changes and minor fixes since April 2010, there have been no production outages. The project finished just under the $6.1M budget frozen in 2006 despite having to incorporate late breaking business changes in 2009.

  There has been some hubbub on the PMI Agile Yahoo Group these last couple of weeks. A lively back-and-forth about a slide deck published by the PMI Network magazine entitled “Is Agile Right for your project?”

The original slides were here, but interestingly the slides appear to have been taken down now, or perhaps they have been temporarily lost in the recent PMI web site reorganization. An example of some of the feedback can be seen here. On the one hand I think the PMI should be applauded for making some steps towards providing information for its members. On the other hand the material could have been vetted by some members of the PMI Agile Community of Practice before release to smooth out the contentious issues and avoid the backlash.

I recall the original request for information on agile adoption guidance was sent to the PMI Agile Community of Practice. I submitted my thoughts on the topic (posted previously here) and many other people joined in the discussion thread, but I am not aware of what, or if any, of this information made it to the original requestor.

Anyway, my point is not so much on the content of the slides and what was right or wrong, but more on the reconciliation of agile and traditional PMI mindsets.

Social Integration Problems
Whenever two different groups come together for the first time, we get some friction, clashing of norms, exposing of preconceptions and good old fashioned faux pas by one or more groups. But, hey, it at least means the two groups are coming together and providing we have thick enough skins to tolerate the friction progress can be made.

Jane Jenson, from the University of Montreal, provides a model for social integration that lists 5 characteristics that need to be in place to create good social cohesion between different groups:

1)    Recognition – Both groups need to recognize the other group’s position
2)    Legitimacy – Both groups need to acknowledge the validity of the other group’s point of view
3)    Inclusion – Neither group should be excluded from events, roles, or functions
4)    Belonging – The benefits of belonging to a combined whole need to be understood
5)    Participation – Both groups need to work alongside each other on shared initiatives

Researchers also provide the following model of how social cohesion works: