Borrowers & Followers; PMI 2011 North America Congress

Today was the last day of the PMI Global Congress in Dallas Texas. I've heard there were somewhere around 3000 attendees. In general, the event was similar to past years with some featured speakers, a lot of paper presentations, and the exhibition hall with vendors.

Malcolm Gladwell with PMI CEO Mark Langley

The highlight for me was the keynote speaker, Malcolm Gladwell. He talked about company cultures and innovation. The companies that are really successful aren't necessarily the ones that invent the new ideas, they're the borrowers and followers. He used Apple as an example. They didn't invent the graphic user interface or the MP3 player but they were the ones that saw the true potential of these items and brought the products to market that people wanted. Facebook was another example, it wasn't the first social media site, but the creators learned from what others had tried to come up with the best product. 

There were about 55 Area of Focus presentations. I primarily attended sessions related to agile (I also did a presentation, on Kanban). This was the first year that the communities selected papers for specific tracks. I really enjoyed Mike Cottmeyer's presentation in the agile track. He talked about scaling agile to the enterprise. His model included a user story level that followed an iterative agile approach, and a feature and epic level above that using a kanban approach. I was interrupted by work and missed Dennis Steven's presentation, but I understand it was similar (you can find a lot of Dennis's presentations in slideshow here). 

Jesse Fewell, who founded the agile community, did a nice job with fixed price agile projects. One of his key points was that you should focus on success criteria, not on features, when defining the scope of the project. He also talked about dynamic scope; if you want to add something into the release, you have to take something else of of similar size. Size should be in terms of cost, not something more obscure like story points. 

I also caught an interesting presentation titled Agile Collaboration in a Virtual World that was presented by Elizabeth Harrin, Cornelius Fichtner, and Andrew Filev. They are all members of PMI's New Media Counsel.

There was a lot of interest in agile. Some people were very new to the concepts, others had played around with it, and a few that were looking for the more advance topics that Mike, Jesse, and Dennis presented. I missed Michele Sliger's presentation, but I understand it was a great discussion of the more fundamental points of agile. 

There was a lot more twitter traffic this year, including an official PMI tweeter. You can find traffic by searching for #pminac. We also used #agc11 for agile tweets. Next year, Vancouver.

Final thoughts - PMI North America Global Congress

Well I'm back home after the PMI Global Congress in Washington DC (well, actually Oxon Hill Maryland). As with most conferences, there were some good presentations and some that didn't really impact me. Some of my favorites from this year were:

• Jesse Fewell on Modern Agile Contracts. He had some new ideas on contracts and was able to make what could have been a dry topic interesting
• Michele Sliger's Goodbye Scope Creep, Hello Agile.
• Jeff Ottman and Dr Preston Smith on extending agile beyond software development.
• Richard Sheridan's The Keys to a Sustainable Work Pace
• Elizabeth Harrin on social media for project management
• Dr Thomas Juli on collaboration tools

I consider a presentation good if I walk away with 1 or 2 ideas that I can apply back at the office. It also helps if the presenter knows what their doing. Dr Juli wins the award for best slides. He is a fan of Slide:ology, but the ideas are similar to Presentation Zen which I am a fan of. The better presenters also managed to have good levels of interaction, in spite of the size of their audience.

It was interesting to follow the twitter feed throughout the congress. Oddly, it seemed I knew most of the people tweeting. Does that say anything about the type of people I hang out with?

The real benefit of an event like this is the networking. This event was no different. I re-aquanted with old friends, got to know some people I had met in the past better, and met some new people (some that I knew through twitter/blogs etc already).

PMI Congress - part 1

The PMI North America Congress began yesterday. This year there are a large number of agile tracks. PMI VP-IT Frank Schettini has been introducing the agile speakers to help spread the message that PMI does support agile.

Yesterday's keynote was Bill Clinton. While I didn't agree with his politics while he was in office, he kept his presentation relatively politic-free. At the end of the session, Greg Balestrero asked him what his hopes for where for the country in 5 years.

President Clinton said there were those hopes that we can't do anything about, like I hope it's a nice day tomorrow. Then there were hopes that should tell us what we should do with our lives. So if you hope for a better world, what can you do to help bring it about. When our founding fathers wrote the constitution, it was with the idea that we would never be perfect but that we should always be striving to getting better.