PMI Agile Contact Hours versus PMI-ACP PDUs

I get asked on a regular basis what the difference between a contact hour and a PDU is. When people come to my PMI-ACP exam prep class, they qualify to claim 21 Agile contact hours.  If they currently have another PMI credential, they could choose to apply those 21 hours as a PDU.

PMI Agile Contact Hours

When completing your PMI-ACP application, you are required to report (among other things) your "Agile" education. They will be referred to and measured as contact hours. To qualify to sit for the ACP exam, you need 21 contact hours.

 Professional Development Units (PDUs)

PDUs can only be applied if you have a PMI credential.  If you try to claim a PDU and you don't have a credential, PMI will politely either tell you don't have permission to that area of the website (where you claim the PDU) or they will send you a friendly email. The image below is only viewable if you have at least one PMI credential.

Hope this brief overview helps. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.

Respecting Team Diversity

I talk about team diversity in my training.  With a world filled with individuals, we have to learn to respect the differences of others.  If you don't, I think you will live and work in a lot smaller world than me.  More importantly, if you don't respect the differences of others, I'm a lot less open to have anything to do with you.   It doesn't matter if we're dealing with functional roles on a team (developers vs. QA), race, gender, or religion.  Respect the differences of others or keep your narrow minded thoughts to yourself.  Actually, that's not right.  Communications is good.  Tell everyone what you're thinking so we know who you are. I have two examples where lack of respect for diversity was clear to me but not others.

Scenario 1:  The Cut Scout Pack Leader

My son is a cub scout.  We have raised him to respect everyone, regardless of their many differences, to include gender, color, or religion.

The other night, we received an email from our son's Cub Scout Pack leader.  It probably would not have bothered me so much if not for the fact that the pack has scheduled events on Jewish holidays and then rescheduled events around Christian holidays.  Let me be clear that on a den level, the leaders have been very good in speaking to the boys in more general terms. "Be respectful, whatever your faith".  My hat is off to these fellows.  I appreciate that they go the extra mile.  So here is the email we got from the pack leader:

Hello Pack,

This sunday is scout sunday February 5. Please wear your class A uniform with pride in church that day. If you would like to participate but do not attend church regularly. I offer up New Market Methodist church on north alley just off 874 behind main street in New Market.  Their service is at 9:30 and 11:00 am.

A scout is reverent. This is one of the points of the scout law, and the reason for scout sunday.

I read no mention of what a boy should do if he attends a temple, synagogue, or mosque. I guess they are just out of luck.  I think it was the last two sentences that put me over the edge.  "A scout is reverent. This is one of the points of the scout law, and the reason for scout Sunday."

Actually, reverent is defined as feeling or showing deep and solemn respect.  Clearly something the pack leader lacks for other religions.

Scenario 2: The CIO

Back in the day, I was the Manager of Software Engineering.  My team was amazing and I would do anything for them.  One particular item of note was the fact that probably 90% of them were from India.  Now, I say I'm German but I wasn't born in Germany.  When I say my teammates were from India, I mean they were here on H1B visas from India.  Why is that important?  Because, as far as I was concerned, I needed to respect their cultural differences and try to accommodate them in any way I could.

So, who was the person who lacked the respect (or understanding) of their cultural differences?  The CIO just could not understand why the team would rather have Diwali off instead of Christmas.  He didn't understand how offensive it was when he said to order lunch for the team and recommended I just order "a couple different kinds of meat sandwiches".

Do you know someone who lacked respect for diversity?  What did you do?

Image Source: Pictofigo

Optimize the Whole

I know we talk about self-organized and empowered teams being at the heart of agile practices.  But sometime I see that focus from individuals and teams going a little too far.  Sometimes people forget about the big picture.  I believe everything we do needs to map back to organizational visions and goals.  If you can't do that, what you are doing is wasteful.  For some organizations, everything needs to map back to increasing profits or lowering costs.  But we have to be careful not to fall into the "local optimum" trap.

A local optimum of a combinatorial optimization problem is a solution that is optimal (either maximal or minimal) within a neighboring set of solutions. This is in contrast to a global optimum, which is the optimal solution among all possible solutions. (Thank you Wikipedia)

You can read more about local optimums in the late Eli Goldratt's book, The Goal.  To the layman, you should consider activities and efforts that will benefit the organization or process flow as a whole, not necessarily what is best for you or your team.  I know it sounds counter-intuitive but hear me out.

You've probably seen this local optimum in action in one way or the other.  If you have a process flow, it's happened.  With a traditional waterfall application development flow, have you ever had a development team deliver features without any concern of the impact to their QA counterparts or others downstream in the process?  The release is dependent on the other teams but what do they care?  They were very efficient at getting their work done.

Have you ever had that boss who was utterly obsessed with keeping everyone "100%" busy rather then being focused on ensuring the greatest amount of value flowed through the system in the shortest possible time?  Both instances are bringing attention to practices that happen and we just accept them.  One example is focusing too much on the localized efficiency. The other focuses too much on utilization.

My Freeway Analogy

When I get on the freeway, I don't care that I can go the speed limit for 5 miles out of my 50 mile commute (localized efficiency).  I really don't care how many cars the freeway can hold (utilization).  What I care about is that I can go as fast as I can for my overall commute.  That should be the goal.

I'll close with one of my favorite quotes by Eli Goldratt

A system of local optimums is not an optimum system at all

I'm curious if others out there can give me some more examples of local optimums and how they addressed them.  How did you optimize the whole?

Image Source: Awesome DC

The Dark Side of Agile Exams

This morning I read a very interesting post over at the AgileScout website titled Agile exams fact check. Peter Saddington (AgileScout) voiced his concerns about a PMI-ACP exam prep website called AgileExams.com.  Concerns ranged from questionable pass rates (97%) to testimonials from people who appeared to not be  PMI-ACPs. Now, I believe in capitalism.  I believe in building products that have value and can help people.  So, this morning, I went onto the AgileExams website and took a practice exam.  Per my involvement with the PMI Agile Community of Practice, my involvement with the PMI-ACP exam, and someone who actually took the exam, in my opinion, these questions are not relevant to the exam.  I'm not saying they are not accurate.  They speak very specifically to content within the PMI recommended reading list.  But the exam is not written that way.

If Agile Exams commented on the Agile Scout blog, answering the questions of its readers, perhaps this would have faded into the background rather quickly.  Instead, I was cc'd on an email from Agile Exams Customer Service to Peter.  Rather than, reading "Peter, we hear you and the community and we'll make things right.  We'll be transparent. We'll iterate our product.  We'll be agile",

this is a snippet of what I read

Kindly remove the post or make serious revisions to it to reflect that you were wrong in your baseless attack. I warned you earlier that you were border-lining on defamation/libel. In fact, you aren't just throwing into question the integrity of agileexams.com but also the integrity of Ravi, who does not deserve this negative attention at all! If I do not see satisfactory updates on your site, legal means will be considered.

I just saw Jesse Fewell also posted something about AgileExams.  I'm also getting emails from people I know and respect in the Agile community asking questions.  Curious to see how this plays out.

The Agile Scout blog post now has 29 comments and counting.

Image Source: Pictofigo

How One Group used Agile, Lean, & Scrum for Social Good

Today I saw a link on Twitter that intrigued me. It was a video of WikiSpeed's Joe Justice at TEDxRainier. Sure, the video is 10 minutes long. But, I guarantee it will leave you inspired. I get challenged all the time by people saying Agile is only good for Software Development. Well, watch this video and see if you don't agree that the horizon has expanded. If you don't want to click the link above, I'm adding an embedded video below.

PMI Agile CoP Transparency

Back in December, the PMI Agile Community of Practice (CoP) leadership agreed we'd take steps to provide some transparency into what we are doing.  If you are curious about what we're up to, I invite you to follow the link below. Here is the link to our board. https://pmiagilecop.leankitkanban.com

Anyone can access this Kanban (read only): Username: AgileCOP@gmail.com Password:  GoAgile

What do you think?  Is this enough transparency?

Image Source: Pictofigo

PMI-ACP Proficiency

I received a notification that I passed the PMI-ACP exam.  But I was curious how well I did.  I logged into the PMI website and viewed my Exam Report.  It's nice to know I am Proficient in both of the defined domains. How did you do on the exam?  I'd love to hear about it.

How to Help PMI Chapters & Members

After speaking with a few PMI Chapters, I see them (at least the ones I spoke to) suffering from one major issue.  How to they grow their membership?

Membership

Because PMI has created an ecosystem where people pay serious money to prepare for certification exams and then continue to pay good money for Professional Development Units (PDU)s to maintain those certifications, why don't the Chapters capitalize on that?  The PMI Chapter is much more than a monthly opportunity to exchange business cards.  They are a conduit to continued education.

PMI Chapters are trying to provide value to and grow their memberships.  If the membership drops too low, clearly there can be a problem. With the average annual dues for a PMI Chapter (in the United States) at $25, what value can they provide as an incentive to join the Chapter? Additionally, without collecting enough membership dues, PMI Chapters have to find other forms of revenue to sustain themselves.

I believe the solution to growing PMI Chapter membership (or PMI membership) is to make it more cost effective to be a member (of both) than it is to be a n0n-member pursuing or maintaining a PMI credential.  PMI and PMI Chapters should adopt the old American Express slogan membership has its privileges.

Idea 1:

The cost for PMI membership is $129 to join and $119 to renew (annually).  The cost for annual PMI Chapter membership averages $25.  PMI should require all Registered Education Providers (REP) to extend a discount to exam preparation training by more than $150 to PMI Chapter members.  Right there, the membership has paid for itself.  On top of that, they should discount single PDU offerings by at least 10%.

Idea 2:

REPs should profit share with the PMI Chapters. I see PMI Chapters selling advertising to training providers.  That model doesn't really scale.  Training providers are paying for advertising in the hope there will be revenue generated to justify the cost.  This caps the revenue the Chapter can make and provides no guarantee to the training vendor that the investment is worth while.  Why don't the Chapters just ask for a percentage of revenue with the agreement to distribute the training option to their membership?  It's a win-win agreement.

Idea 3:

PMI Chapters should make deals with authors and suppliers, to offer the same type of profit sharing model.  Think of Amazon affiliate links.  It costs you nothing to promote these products but if people trust your recommendation, you could potentially create revenue.  The same goes for the PMI Chapters.  If their membership trusts them, they could provide them discounts on products and services AND get a referral fee.

Summary:

Again, remember the old slogan for American Express.  Membership has its privileges.  It doesn't matter if you are a member of PMI, The Scrum Alliance, or Agile Leadership Network.  Membership SHOULD also provide discounts.

Or course I want to put my money where my mouth is.  My PMI-ACP 3-day workshop is $1495.  If a PMI Chapter member wants to take my class, they need only to identify the chapter they are a member of and I'll discount the cost of the workshop to $1250.  That will save them $245.  Additionally, I'll send $150 to the PMI Chapter they belong to.  If interested, just contact me.

Image Source: Pictofigo