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.

The Enlightened Project Manager

I just finished teaching a 3 day class on agile project management to a group if PMs in Cairo, Egypt. The class was one of the outcomes of an agreement signed between the Egyptian Government and the PMI IT & Telecom SIG last year. I’m approaching 10 years of volunteer service with the SIG.

One of the points we spent a lot of time discussing is when to apply agile. I spent some time talking about the sweet spot for agile…projects that don’t have clear requirements, are not huge, have strong user involvement, and have higher risk. New technology projects are good examples.

The idea of the Enlightened PM is one that knows the right tool to use for the project they have in front of them. While there are some that would disagree, I don’t think agile is the right approach to every project. I still think there’s a place for waterfall. I also know there are projects that will work well using more radical approaches such as Kanban.

One of the discussions revolved around an SAP implementation. Our conclusion was that you could do the initial implementation of SAP using their ASAP methodology (disclosure: I helped SAP develop the project management practices that go with ASAP). However, when you start working on enhancements, you can use agile, or even Kanban to manage those changes.

One of the participants in my class was in the construction industry. While I wouldn’t recommend agile for building a house, it can be used for designing a house.