My Personal Kanban Birthday gift

I would like to publicly thank everyone who sent me birthday wishes.  Gotta love Facebook, Google+ and all of the other places that broadcast your birthday to the world.  It's actually pretty cool to hear from people I haven't talked to in a while.  Rather than go into details about how I ate durian fruit or how I was convinced my wife hired a belly dancer for our dinner date with friends, I'll focus on the good stuff. Not only did I score several containers of coffee, but I also got a physical copy of Personal Kanban from my parents. I have Jim and Tonianne's Kindle version of Personal Kanban but sometimes when you really like something, you just have to have a physical copy.  I honestly didn't think I was that sentimental.

My son and I also got matching white boards to help us navigate our lives.  So, if you're thinking of a stocking stuffer this year, get that special person a copy of Personal Kanban and some post-its.  They'll be glad you did.

Oh, and if you look in the background of the photo, you'll see my wife has LeanKit Kanban up on her screen.  Ya, we're a weird family.

PMI Agile CoP Strategic Planning Team Wrap-up

Before we went our separate ways, the PMI Agile CoP Strategic Planning team did a retrospective (not depicted in the image enclosed). I had a few key comments. First, as a positive, I felt like I finally understood where the PMI Agile Community of Practice was in its evolution. Second, I honestly think we are going in the right direction. In the negative, my comment was a bit tempered. I thought the time we had was too short. But I understand the need for us to set short timeboxes and then deliver something of value. Without deadlines, we would probably debate things to death.

Right now, I am emotionally exhausted. I arrived mid-day Saturday (12/3) and I am returning home mid-day Tuesday (12/6). We had group discussions, sidebar discussions, and even discussions during and after every meal!

Everyone was passionate about his or her perspectives and I don't think there was a single topic that didn't require lengthy debate, reflection, and decisions. There were times I felt we were going down rat holes, debating the language that we should and would agree on. But, without those passionate conflicts, we wouldn't have explored the possibilities or arrived at better outcomes.

Thank you to PMI (Rory, Priya, and Brenard) for taking care of everything and allowing the team to come together and focus on the important work at hand. The Agile CoP is very young and it was important for us to focus on critical areas to continue growing a community that is self-sustaining, transparent, and supportive.

Thank you to the core team of Ainsley, Bob, Dean, Devin, and Sameer (alphabetical order) for speaking your minds and standing your ground.

A very special thank you goes to Jesse, Dennis, and Brian. Over the course of a few days, you accomplished great things. The community and PMI both owe you a lot.

Outside of our planning group, as our community grows even larger, I ask for patience and participation from both traditional and agile project managers. The Agile CoP leadership want to be as transparent as possible. As goals become more ambitious, the need for volunteers (and future servant-leaders) will grow.

In closing, I want readers to remember, we want the PMI members worldwide to be equipped to lead and thrive in a human-centric and ever changing world by embracing adaptive and empirical proactive practices.

I am left inspired.

PMI Agile CoP Strategic Planning Day 1

The first full day of the PMI Agile Community of Practice strategic planning session just wrapped up.  It's been an amazing day.  We discussed how we could help Project Management Practitioners, PMI Members, CoP Volunteers, and Agile Leaders. Topics ranged from increasing awareness of Agile, to the PMI-ACP, and a PMI-ACP Glossary. Though we all come from all over the country, different organizations, and different backgrounds, we have at least one thing in common.  We all have a passion for Agile.

Because the PMI-ACP certification is transitioning to an operational stage, myself and a few others focused deeply on what we wanted to see happen in 2012.  First, you'll be seeing the PMI-ACP v1.1 coming January 31.  You should see PMI-ACP v1.2 out the end of the second quarter.  I'll save the real good stuff for subsequent posts.  Until then, goodnight from Miami.

Protective Collaboration

I was recently asked my opinion about collaboration within an organization.  Being I just completed an organizational assessment for a client, I have a fresh perspective of the topic. I was specifically asked:

"Is it healthy for Scrum teams to work in a bubble protected from the business around them? Should collaboration go beyond the team?"

There are two common threads that I see time and time again. One, what is the goal? Two, is that goal communicated?  Until these two threads are tied together, you can't have good collaboration.  I don't see this being unique to the world of Scrum.  To help illustrate my point, I'll try to use terms people outside the Scrum community can understand.

Strategic Mission (Goals)

Executive Leadership, in order to lead, needs to communicate the strategic vision of the organization.  Strategic vision translates into strategic mission or long-term goals. Strategic mission should be understood by the entire organization.  If you don't know the mission, how will you be able to help the organization reach its goals?  From there, the leadership needs to empower people tasked to do the work to figure out how they will accomplish the goals.

Tactical Mission (Goals)

This is where you keep lines of communication open but insert a protective buffer.  If you're leveraging Scrum, that first buffer is called a Product Owner.  This person understands the strategic mission of the organization and is able to translate it into tactical mission.  You could also refer to this person as an organizational liaison.  This person or group of people don't need to know all of the answers.  But, they do need to be readily available to answer questions from the team and to reach out to the appropriation organizational subject matter expert(s) when necessary.  The second buffer, when leveraging Scrum, is called the ScrumMaster.  If not leveraging Scrum, they could also be known as a process manager.  This person understands organizational process on a team level and is there to ensure the team consistently follows that process.  They also work to keep those who do not aid in tactical execution from derailing the team from getting work down.

Collaborative Team

It's time for me to answer the first direct question. Is it healthy for Scrum teams to work in a bubble protected from the business around them?  Though I do believe the team should be protected from the business directly trying to change their tactical priorities, you should never operate in a vacuum. If people from within the organization do try to change team short-term priorities, the process manager (ScrumMaster) should be right there to impress upon them the needs of the organization and to respect the agreed upon processes.

Collaborative Organization

The second question was, should collaboration go beyond the team? My short answer is, yes.  Communications is different from collaboration and it needs to flow up and down the organization.  With information flowing freely, I've seen good (strategic) ideas become bad ideas overnight.  All it might take is one executive standing in the back of the room during a daily (stand-up) meeting.  Once the appropriate information is presented to the appropriate people, real collaboration can take place.  The entire organization, which includes all cost and profit centers, needs to collaborate to discover the best solutions and work toward common goals.

What do you think?

Did I miss anything?

The Future of Agile & PMI

During my session at the AgileDC conference, I talked about the past, present, and future of Agile. I drew a parallel between the adoption curve of Agile and Geoffrey Moore's adoption curve of technology.  Even before the Agile Manifesto was penned, there were Innovators introducing agile practices and mindsets.  In the last ten years, the early adopters and visionaries have taken Agile to the next step of market acceptance.  I'll admit, I only started using agile practices about 6 years ago.  During that time, as acceptance of Agile has grown, the Agile "mantra" has been relatively consistant.  I like to use the word mantra because Agile really does create a transformation.  If the values and principles of the Manifest resonate with you, you become an adopter, a proponent, and a member of a community.

The Agile community is a self-organized group of like-minded people and market adoption has been very organic.  So, back to my session at AgileDC.  I wanted to make a point of saying that Agilists do what they do because something resonates within them.  What we are doing, as Agilists, feels like it aligns with why we do it.  We want to deliver more value.  We want more interactions and collaborations. We respond to change.

Now, let's look at the Project Management community, specifically that group related to the Project Management Institute.  The primary difference between the PMI community and the Agile community is Project Managers don't appear to be joined by a common cause.  Rather, they are joined by a common certification. PMI's goal is

“Serve practitioners and organizations with standards that describe good practices, globally recognized credentials that certify project management expertise, and resources for professional development, networking and community.“

While I was doing research for my AgileDC session, I came across an interesting fact.  What Project Managers (associated with PMI) are doing does not align with why they are doing it.  Scan the blogoshere and you'll find less content about how to become a better project manager and more about how to pass the Project Management Professional (PMP®) exam.  Though the graph above about Agile Adoption is subjective, the graph below is not.

Something happened in February 2008.  It was the last time there were more members of PMI than there were PMPs. (260,458 vs. 259,694) Since then, the gap has widened to 366,854 PMI members and over 466,163 PMPs.  Project managers, associated with PMI, find more value in a certification than they do being a member of a community.  But can you blame them?  Job listings require certifications or accreditations.  Hiring managers search for acronyms and not people.  The simple truth is some are pursuing the mastery of performance-based objectives versus learning-based objectives (ie. getting a passing score on an exam versus getting better at a craft).  Since credential holders don't have to be a member of the community to maintain their PMP status, they dropped their memberships.  If not for the fact that I could not be a member of the PMI Agile Community of Practice without being a member of PMI, I would probably have ended my membership as well.  But, that alone is enough for me to stay.

The Agile Community of Practice (CoP) and it's leadership are self-organized.  I get a different vibe from them than I do others associated with PMI.  It's less about how do I maintain my certification and more about how can we help others.  It is my hope that as the Agile CoP grows, its servant leadership and passion will spread to other areas of PMI.

With the PMI-ACP certification, I'm very curious how this will impact the Agile community and the PMI community.  When I did my last PMI-ACP prep class, 66% of my learners were PMPs and 33% of the class was not associated with PMI at all.  Will the PMI-ACP just be another group of letters to appear in a hiring manager's keyword search or will it become more than that?  I truly hope it is the latter.

If you are a member of PMI, I strongly recommend that you join the Agile Community of Practice (it's free for PMI members).  The writing is on the wall, people.  It's a sign of things to come.  What if you are a PMP but not a member of PMI?  I think joining the Agile CoP is worth the price of the membership.  Regardless of what happens at PMI, Agile will continue to be an ever-evolving self-organized force.

My PMI-ACP Exam Experience

Because I wanted to ensure people taking my class were learning things that are actually on the PMI-ACP exam, I thought it necessary to actually take the test.  Sure, I was an independent reviewer of the PMI-ACP content but I was not part of the team who wrote the exam.  Let me just say, I think those who wrote the exam did us all proud.  I know it sounds sick but I really enjoyed taking this exam. It wasn't too hard or easy.  For a v1.0 exam, it's pretty darn good.  If you've been leveraging Agile for several years, I think you could pass it (in its current form).  Let me caveat that by saying you'd have to be properly leveraging Lean, XP, and Scrum for several years.  In all seriousness, there are people who still think cowboy coding or having no formal process or documentation makes them "agile".  This exam pays its respects to the values and principles of agile practices and to those who wrote the Agile Manifesto just 10 years ago. Now, considering every exam will be different, you can't take my testing experience as gospel to prepare.  But, you can focus your attention in certain areas.  I'm pretty certain I won't upset anyone with this blog post.  I'm not exposing any super-secret strategy to game the exam.  I remember taking the PMP and getting frustrated because I felt like the goal was to trick me, not test me.  Thankfully, the PMI-ACP is not crafted like the PMP.  It's written in a tone an everyday Agilist will understand.

Here is my bullet list for public consumption.  The rest I will reserve for my PMI-ACP classes. (shameless plug)

• Know the Agile Manifesto Values and Principles.  Understand them.  Don't just memorize them.

• Have an end-to-end understanding of Scrum.
• Know and understand the key roles of Scrum.
• Know and understand the artifacts of Scrum.
• Understand what are and why we use big visible charts or information radiators.
• Be able to read a burndown chart and offer a few scenarios that would explain its appearance.
• Understand all of the Scrum meetings.  Who is there? Why? What happens and when?
• Understand Scrum from a ScrumMaster perspective.
• Understand Scrum from a Product Owner perspective.
• Understand Scrum from an empowered Team perspective.
• Know and understand the XP (eXtreme Programming) roles and who does what.
• Understand Test Driven Development. Know how it works and why it's valuable.
• Understand Continuous Integration. Know how it works and why it's valuable.
• Understand the Lean Software Development Principles
• Know what Lean Portfolio Management is and how your organization could benefit from it.
• Understand what Value Stream Mapping is and how to do it
• Understand the basics of Kanban
• Understand what WIP is and why it works.
• Know what Osmotic Communications is.
• Understand what makes a Servant Leader and what they do.
• Understand Velocity and it's usefulness.
• Understand Risk Burn Down Charts
• Know about Risk Audit Meetings
• Know Agile Estimation techniques
• Understand the Definition of "Done"
• Know how to write and identify good User Stories.
• Know what Personas are and how to use them.
• Understand why and when you would use AgileEVM (don't worry about how!)

Remember, you have 3 hours to answer 120 questions.

Good luck!

My AgileDC 2011 Session

AgileDC has come and gone but not without sharing memories with old friends and new.  It was great to meet Rory McCorkle of PMI, Howard Sublett of Big Visible, and countless others.  Peter Saddington (of AgileScout) and I even had a chance to hang out, go out for steaks, and have a few drinks. I have to say, AgileDC was a great event.  It was sold out and I scrambled to get tickets for my PMI-ACP learners.  There is something very cool about conferences.  Everyone there has something in common.  Foolishly, I thought I had to pick between the PMI Congress and the AgileDC event.  Jesse Fewell proved that it can be done.  Since we haven't had a chance to meet up face-to-face since the PMI NAC 2010, it was great to catch up a little.  As long as the PMI Congress 2012 is not scheduled on the same day as AgileDC next year, I plan to be there.  Now I just need to get my session ready to submit to PMI!

I want to thank everyone who attended my session, When PMI Introduced the Elephant in the Room.  I'll save details about my session for another blog post. Special thank you to Tonianne DeMaria Barry , co-author of Personal Kanban for attending my session.  Strange how you can "know" so many people from Twitter and never meet them in person.  I guess I just need to get out more.

My session was well received (no fruits or vegetables were thrown) and I received some really positive feedback.  The common note was "Wanted to hear more about the PMI-ACP".

I even convinced Richard Chang of Excella to wear a muscle suit!  In appreciation to him putting him self out there and being an Agile Leader, I won't publish the photos of him.  What happened at AgileDC will stay at AgileDC.

PMI-ACP Learning is Fun

This week I debuted my PMI-ACP class to the Washington DC/Baltimore area.  Being this was the first time I was offering this class, I had a little trepidation.  Would my students take to my teaching methods?  As I walked into the training center, I passed another classroom.  It was a 5-day PMP exam prep class.  It was a 5-day PMP exam boot camp. Knowing how boot camps are presented, I knew I did not want the same for my class. I was looking to do more that teach people how to pass a test.  I really wanted them to walk away with an understanding of concepts like self-organization, adaptive planning, continuous improvement, or delivering value.  I was looking to spend a lot less time lecturing and a lot more time engaging my students with discussions, simulations, and games.

Over the course of the next three days, we held lengthy discussions on real-world topics.  I would introduce a concept and ask questions like now that I've talked about Concept A, how could you apply it at your organization?  The class would then compare and contrast different scenarios from each of their respective perspectives.  But, I have to admit, some of the best moments of the class came when we played games.  Activities ranged from building paper airplanes, to playing the "ball point" game and building a town out of Lego's.  I can't express the satisfaction I got, when I saw "lightbulb" moments for each of the students.

One of the attendees just wrote me an email, saying:

The class was excellent!  This has been the most valuable class I have had relative to understanding Agile and applying it to my organization.

We had 6 early-adopters at the first class and I got some excellent feedback.  I know the next class will be even better.  Anyone have some Lego's for sale?