drunkenpm

2009-11-03T05:48:00.001-06:00

P2P 2009, Cairo Egypt
P2P 2009 kicked off today with opening presentations by a number of keynote speakers including Brisk Consulting CEO and event organizer, Emad Aziz, Dr. Gamal Nassar, Chairman of PMI MENA Chapter; Philip Diab, the immediate past Chair of PMI; current PMI Chair, Ricardo Viana Vargas and former Managing Director of the Scrum Alliance, Jim Cundiff. This year P2P is significantly larger than last year. It is being held under the auspices of H.E. Dr. Ahmed Darwish, Minister of State for Administrative Development and H.E. Dr. Hatem El Gabaly, Minister of Health and includes tracks on Technology, Agile and Scrum, Construction, and Oil and Gas.

"Egypt is wonders of the past and investment in the future"

During the opening presentation by Dr. Darwish this morning he talked about the growth of project management in Egypt and the need to develop talent internally so that as Egypt completes the current five year plan in 2012 and moves into the five year plan that will end in 2017, there are PMs who are trained in their craft and experienced and skilled enough to get the work done. PMI Chair, Ricardo Vargas spoke about PMI's commitment to developing PM best practices and awareness in the African region and talked about the work the Project Management Institute Educational Foundation (PMIEF) is doing to promote Project Management training for high-schools. In a presentation on the work of PMIEF, PMI Immediate Past Chair Philip Diab, gave an expanded view into all the great work they are doing to develop scholarships and expanded educational offerings for the underprivileged as well as emerging markets.

After the coffee break, incoming PMI Board Member, Frank Parth, gave a presentation of PMI Standards, how they are defined and developed. Frank was the project manager on PMI's Standard for Program Management, 2nd Edition.

We're only part of the way through Day 1, and I have to get back to the hall to attend the rest of the day's sessions. Over then next three days, sessions will be held by several IT&T SIG Board Members including, IT&T SIG Chair, Petra Goltz; VP of Strategic Marketing, Bob Tarne; VP Professional Development, Marisa Oldnall; VP Operations (and incoming Vice Chair), Andy Maxymillian as well as myself. PMI Agile Community of Practice founder Jesse Fewell will be giving a number of presentations over the next few days as will Jim Cundiff.

If you'd like to follow the events, we are using the hash tag #p2pconf in Twitter.

More to follow

2009-09-15T08:26:00.005-05:00

Premature Tweetage

An interesting story on the Social Engineering Through (un)intentional Manipuation of Social Media front...

An article on Obama calling Kanye West a "jackass" for being, well, a "jackass" at the MTV awards showed up online this morning. Apparently it was an off the record comment that was made, and then tweeted by ABC's Terry Moran. Here is the article about it:

http://www.politico.com/click/stories/0909/did_obama_call_kanye_a_jackass.html

ABC news then issues an apology for premature tweeting of an off the record story. The tweet is no longer on Terry Moran's twitter page http://twitter.com/TerryMoran

Now I'm wondering how long it will be before people start "accidentally tweeting" stuff that they delete and apologize for as soon as the meme has leaked and begun to work its' viral damage.

2009-09-15T01:41:00.004-05:00

Social Media and Personal Branding - Episode 1

Interview with Brian Flatow, President of The AdStore

I’ve posted the first of three podcasts in a series on Personal Branding and Social Media. This one is an interview with Brian Flatow, President of the Ad Store. I’ve known Brian a long time and it was great to get the opportunity to get to sit down and hear his thoughts on how to use Twitter, the other social media tools and how it can help/hurt personal brand.
You can find the video on the IT&T SIG website -> http://www.pmi-ittelecom.org/

2009-08-31T21:00:00.001-05:00

Hamsketball - The Sport of Kings
(We need your help!)

It is a simple idea, very basic, and someday, with any luck, it will be huge. If baseball was bourne on the back of cricket, this will be the successor of basketball. This is Hamsketball.

At it’s core, Hamsketball is just like basketball, except instead of the round ball that has bounced across so many playgrounds and gym floors, in this one, the rock is made of ham.

I know what you’re thinking, it can’t bounce, and… it’s made of compressed ham, it will never work, yadda, yadda, yadda. People always underestimate the pig. After all, it is the swiss army knife of meat. Bacon, ham, scrapple, pigs feat, pigs ears, and all the glorious cuts of pork… nothing brings value to the table like the pig. And now, it’s not just for breakfast anymore.

Of course, the road to greatness is always rocky. Today my daughter and I took a great leap towards the future national pastime. In a deli on John St. in NYC, we decided to find out just how much it would cost to make a hamsketball. Apparently, a lot more than we can afford. We’re figuring that in order to get one good hamsketball, we’ll need an entire thing (we don’t know what the giant shrink wrapped thing of compressed deli ham is called) costs about $125. Clearly, those folks at Boar’s Head saw this coming. At $125 a pop, figuring at least 2-3 balls per game, Hamsketball might as well be ham polo.

If anyone out there has connections to the folks making those giant allotments of pig finery, if you could put a word in, the world will be in your debt as we move one step closer to the new one, true sport. Hamsketball – the sport of kings!

2009-08-17T23:55:00.005-05:00

The Shrunken drunkenPM and the Portuguese Sessions

Last week I had the great honor of being video interviewed by my favorite shrink, Bas de Baar on ProjectShrink.com. This time, the topic was Personal Branding. The video went up today.

http://blog.softwareprojects.org/personal-branding-for-project-managers-1880.html

I'm also very happy to report that I put up some new video interviews from the Portugal Chapter Congress this past Spring. I've posted interviews with Alexandre Rodrigues, President of PMI Portugal, Gabriela Fernandes, who also serves on the PMI Portugal Board and was the organizer of the event, and Theofanis Giotis, the President of PMI Greece.

You can find the videos on the PMI IT&T SIG site.

2009-07-31T16:31:00.001-05:00

Video Podcast Update

Posted a new IT&T SIG video podcast – one of the best yet. This is an interview that was shot in Amsterdam at the PMI Congress with Björn Granvik from Jayway. The Swedes in PMI are, as a rule, pretty awesome folk and sharp as hell. In the interview we talk about Jayway, Øredev (one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to because of the diversity present) and Scrum. The twist on Scrum in this podcast is that Björn tells the story of how he started using Scrum in his marriage, making his wife the Product Owner. Pretty soon, the kids took to it as well and began assigning themselves tasks so that their Dad would get to the stuff they wanted to do. It’s a great story. You can access the video on the IT&T SIG website which also has a link to iTunes where you can subscribe to the podcast if you like. I’ve still got a lot from Amsterdam, Portugal and some of the branding and social media stuff I’ve been working on, so I’m trying to put up one a week.

2009-07-27T13:55:00.002-05:00

Link to Gantthead article on branding your projects

This link is to a Gantthead article that was written by Andy Jordan. It makes a case for the importance of branding your projects: http://www.gantthead.com/article.cfm?ID=250504

2009-07-21T22:54:00.001-05:00

Bridging the Gap to Agile: Scrum Status Reporting in a Waterfall Organization

Here is a link to the whitepaper I wrote while I was at EMC, "Bridging the Gap to Agile: Scrum Status Reporting in a Waterfall Organization".

2009-07-21T10:58:00.000-05:00

Personal Branding for Project Managers

Almost out of the woods…

I’ve been quiet, well, not quiet. I’ve been (re)learning some lessons about over commitment. Not out of the woods yet, but close enough that I can hear the cars out there on the highway waiting to run me down when I break through the trees.

The research on PM Mashups has proven to be really interesting. Maybe it is an indicator that the meme hasn’t fully reached the PM world yet, maybe people in this profession need to waste more hours surfing You Tube or watching Towers Under Fire (which makes so much more sense to me now that it did when I rented it from TLA back in college.) In general though, what I’ve found is that there are folks who do mashup techniques and tools from outside PM, but they don’t think of it as a mashup. There are others who have completely different ideas about what a PM Mashup would be.

Either way, the paper for PMI Congress is done and I’m really looking forward to giving the presentation and, more importantly, hearing what the folks who attend have to share about how they are mashing it up.

The best part about the research for this paper was that it led me back to an idea that had been stuck in my head since the Scrum Gathering in Orlando. The idea of Personal Branding and how people in PM or IT use it (or not) and what impact it can have on their world. I got kinda deep into it and was sidetracked from the mashup idea for a few weeks. (Nothing like creating a new project when you already have stuff spilling off the plate.) But now, I’m back at it and this is my new topic. I’m going to put together an article on it, I’ll be posting here in the blog and I’ve already got a few video interviews to post.

What I’ve found so far though is that personal brand is an idea that PMs in general should probably spend a lot more time thinking about it than they do. I still believe that trust and transparency are the currency of PM, but personal branding seems to be that missing piece that can be used to tie some of the other pieces that lay out there, impacting us, but we don’t think about, or just generally aren’t aware of.

I have a few hours of video to edit still from Poland and Amsterdam – I’m going to have it all posted within the next few days. Once it is up, the Personal Branding of Project Managers will be the main focus of this blog.

So, if you are reading this, and you are working in IT or PM, and you actually spend time thinking about and working on Personal Branding, please let me know. I’m hoping to spend awhile on this topic.

2009-06-16T06:47:00.004-05:00

I've posted the video interview that Luis Garcia did with Bas De Baar, the Projectshrink, while were in Amsterdam for the 2009 PMI EMEA Global Congress.

Lots more to come from Amsterdam still, plus I have a bunch from the PMI Portugal Chapter event.

Vimeo http://vimeo.com/pmiittelecom/videos

iTunes http://tinyurl.com/ittsigpodcast

Also, Tobias Mayer, who I had the pleasure of interviewing at the Scrum Gathering in Orlando has an excellent new project that is definitely worth checking out... Welfare CSM

and... (drumroll)

The Certified Scrum Master for Project Managers course is online for registration. The course is being built by Stacia Broderick, Michele Sliger, Mitch Lacey, Jesse Fewell and I. So if you know any one who is a PM and wants to become a Scrum Master, this course is specifically designed to help experienced PMs get their CSM and understand how a seasoned PM can incorporate that into their toolset.

Certified ScrumMaster for Project Managers
Burlington, MA
July 22-24

2009-06-05T11:42:00.005-05:00

PMI Portugal Chapter Event
5 June, 2009 - 6 June 2009, Lisbon, Portugal

Right now they are finishing up the last presentation of Day 1 of the PMI Portugal Chapter Event. The event is very well attended, with over 50% of the members of the chapter present. The presentations today started out in English and switched to Portuguese just before lunch. After the opening session this morning which was led by Prof. Alexandre Rodrigues, PMP, who is the President of the PMI Portugal Chapter and the Conference Chair, along with Gabriela Fernandes, PMP, Director of the PMI Portugal Chapter and the Conference Project Manager and Dr. Jose Pinto, PMP, Director of the PMI Portugal Chapter and the Conference Director. (For those of you keeping score at home, Dr. Pinto also serves as the EMEA Regional Director for the IT&T SIG. The IT&T SIG recently posted interviews that Jose shot with PMI Chair Ricardo Vargas from the PMI EMEA Congress in Amsterdam. The interviews were done in both English and Portuguese. - watch them here and here.)

After the kickoff, Rachel Hammer, the EMEA Component Relations Liaison from the PMI EMEA Service Center gave a presentation on PMI in the EMEA Region and I followed up with a presentation that centered around the idea that if our profession is going to continue to grow and evolve, we (the PMs) are the ones who need to start having at developing new tools and paradigms in order to get us into a new stage of maturity for our profession.

After that, they transitioned over to Portuguese. Sadly,my ability to understand Portuguese is about on par with my ability to understand the game of cricket. However, what was related to me about the presentation that was given by Eng. Julio Moreno from HP Portugal made me quite jealous of the others in the room who are not as language challenged as I.

Since I missed out on the Portuguese sessions I'm going to try and shoot some video this evening on impressions from the first day and I'll try to post them as quickly as possible. (Tonight if I can find a power convertor for my mac because I foolishly left all my adapters at home.)

For the Agile minded, I mentioned it a few times in my presentation and a number of people came up to talk about it further after the session. Which gave me a great opportunity to promote the new Scrum Master for PMPs class that is being developed by the Scrum Alliance, and which I will be writing on in great length later this weekend.

One person in particular had questions about using Lean with, or alongside a traditional PMBOK based approach, if anyone who reads this can comment on that, it would be greatly appreciated.

I will be tweeting from the event tomorrow under @pmiittelecom and both PMI Chair Ricardo Vargas (@rvvargas) and I will be using the hash tag #PMIPC

More later...

2009-05-31T02:46:00.002-05:00

PMI 2009 EMEA Congress Podcast Interviews with PMI Chair Ricardo Vargas, and more...

Got the first of many new video podcasts from Amsterdam up in iTunes and on the IT&T SIG Vimeo site. These were both shot at the 2009 EMEA Congress in Amsterdam.

Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/pmiittelecom/videos
iTunes: http://tinyurl.com/ittsigpodcast

What I posted today were the videos of IT&T SIG Regional Director Jose Angelo da Costa Pinto interviewing PMI Chair Ricardo Vargas. We've got one interview in English and another in Portuguese.

Earlier in the week I posted a link to Ricardo's podcast on Scrum. He was a presenter at the 2009 Latin America Scrum Gathering a few days before the PMI Congress in Amsterdam. Ricardo is an amazing guy and he is very enthusiastic about the efforts being made by the IT&T SIG, PMI and the Scrum Alliance to help build a bridge between the Scrum/Agile community and the PMI community.

I've got a lot more to post in the coming days including an interviews on P2P 2009 with Emad Aziz; an update on Project Wizard's Merlin from Frank Blome; an interview that PMI Agile Forum/CoP founder Jesse Fewell shot with Scrum Alliance Managing Director, Jim Cundiff; and an interview that IT&T SIG VP of Tech, Luis Garcia shot with the Project Shrink himself, Bas de Baar; and more...

Also, for those of you who haven't been following Bas's posts about social media, here is a link to one of his recent posts -> ProjectShrink. Bas gave a great talk on using social media at the PMI Congress in Amsterdam.

I hope to post them within the next few days before heading to Lisbon to speak at the PMI Portugal 4th Annual Project Management Conference. I am really looking forward to the event in Lisbon. It should be very cool.

2009-05-27T05:37:00.002-05:00

Update on Updates

My summary and videos from PMI Leadership and Congress in Amsterdam last week should be up within a day or so.

In the meantime, PMI Chair, Ricardo Vargas has a new website and has posted a podcast on Scrum and Agile. Ricardo spoke at the Scrum Gathering in Latin America just over a week ago before making the trip to Amsterdam for PMI Congress. His level of enthusiasm for building the bridge between traditional Project Management and the Agile world is a wonderful thing.

http://www.ricardo-vargas.com/podcasts/agile1_2/

2009-05-19T10:06:00.001-05:00

Day Two of the 2009 PMI EMEA Global Congress.

After tweeting almost the entire time at PMI’s Leadership Institute Meeting we started at the Global Congress yesterday. Unfortunately the service is weak and expensive, so I’ve fallen behind in my posts.

Some quick Agile highlights….

The most significant event at PMI’s GC this year (IMHO) was the Agile Pecha Kucha sessions. This has been a long time coming and I hope we see a lot more of it. For those who are unfamiliar, the format is 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide. So, rather than watching someone read slides to you for 60 minutes. He now get to watch a much more vibrant presentation in 6:40 seconds. The style also focuses heavily on slides featuring large images or small amount of tax. The lightweight slide format forces the presenter to carry the show instead of the other way around. This is an alternative that has been greatly needed for some time at PMI Congress and Leadership events. With each of the presentations focusing on Agile it made the sessions even more cutting edge. While Agile is certainly not new in the technology space it still represents an innovative approach for the traditional project management crowd. There were four agile sessions over all during Global Congress. Each of them was well attended and the information presented was well received. The last agile session of the Congress was a roundtable discussion featuring Juliette Andrew from EMC, Mattias Petrén from Leadway and PMI Sweden, Excella Consultant and PMI Agile Forum Founder, Jesse Fewell and myself with Bob Tarne, IT&T SIG VP of PR and former Chair as moderator. We had a great crowd with some lively discussion. There is a definite spark within the PMI Community that is picking up on Agile as an important way of adding to the toolset that enables you to solve project problems.

Quote of the day: “It’s really easy to pick the Agile people out in the crowd. They are the ones who don’t look stressed out.”

There is a lot more to tell, but I have to head downstairs for the Taste of Holland reception.

2009-05-17T05:20:00.003-05:00

PMI Leadership Institute Meeting

It is Day 3 of the PMI LIM. Rather than blogging each day, I've been tweeting under @pmiittelecom and @mrsungo.
Jesse Fewell, founder of the PMI Agile Forum has been posting Tweets under @pmiagile

Sessions have been good and I will post a wrap up later.

I have posted a video podcast interview on the Virtual Communities Project with Dan Tuten. You can view it here:

Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/pmiittelecom
iTunes: http://tinyurl.com/co7g4q

This is a big deal for me because I've been trying to post video from LIM/Congress for the past two years and this is the first time I've been able to get anything live from the event.

The Agile folks who will be presenting during the Pecha Kucha sessions will arrive today and I'm looking forward to getting to hang out with them this evening.

Also, Frank Blome (Project Wizard's Merlin - http://projectwizards.net/en/) will be arriving today, can't wait to see him again. Tomorrow I am hoping to meet up with (and interview) Bas de Baar. Bas is the creator of ProjectShrink http://blog.softwareprojects.org/. If you are a PM and aren't reading his blog, you need to start.

Oh - and in the way of shameless self promotion, Gantthead posted the video we shot of my Scrum in the Waterfall presentation. Go see -> http://tinyurl.com/p8yr47

More to come...

2009-05-15T03:12:00.000-05:00

PMI Leadership and Global Congress in Amsterdam

I'll be tweeting from PMI meetings in Amsterdam under @pmiittelecom and using #pmi beginning later today.

Blog posts and video podcast interviews will also be forthcoming.

2009-05-12T08:39:00.004-05:00

Ken Schwaber Interview from the Scrum Gathering in Orlando 2009

One of my favorite parts of the Scrum Gathering in Orlando this Spring was getting to spend a few minutes talking with Ken Schwaber about Scrum, PMI and "Scrum, but..."

Here is a link to the IT&T SIG Video Podcast on iTunes
Here is a link to the IT&T SIG Videos on Vimeo

Next stop, Amsterdam! Look for blog postings, tweets and video interviews from the PMI EMEA Leadership Meetings and Congress.

I'm especially psyched to see what happens when PMI takes on Pecha Kucha... should be quite the mashup.

2009-04-24T17:56:00.001-05:00

2009-04-21T02:03:00.002-05:00

Where's My New New Thing?

If this is a reasonably valid historical timeline of the evolution of Project Management

1950's The birth of modern project management, Gantt Charts, Critical Path, PERT
1960's EVM, PMI Founded
1970's Waterfall coined as a term referring to a flawed, non-working model
1989 PRINCE
1997 Critical Chain

Am I missing anything? It seems like we're due for a new model.

2009-04-14T09:44:00.004-05:00

Scrum Gathering 2009 Videos

I’ve started posting the video interviews from the 2009 Scrum Gathering in Orlando. You can watch PMI Agile Forum’s Jesse Fewell interview Ansley Nies about the Open Space she ran at the Gathering, see an interview with Alistair Cockburn (founder of Crystal and one of the original authors of the Agile Manifesto) and an interview with AgileThinking’s Tobias Mayer.

If you’ve not been following the story, leading up to the Gathering Tobias was pretty critical of PMI being involved. The video interview was shot not long after PMI CEO Greg Balestrero’s Keynote speech and a separate conversation between Greg and Tobias shortly afterward.

You can access the videos in iTunes
or in Vimeo

You can also read up on it in the AgileThinking blog and in Greg Balestrero’s PMI blog.

More videos will be posted in the coming days….

Follow me on Twitter

2009-03-18T21:44:00.000-05:00

Scrum Gathering – Day 3

Day 3 of the Gathering started out with the follow up to Open Space. Around the room, participants shared their impressions of the Open Space and the gathering as a whole. There were a number of people who spoke up as being supportive of, or cautiously optimistic towards the PMI presence.

When PMI Agile Forum leader, Jesse Fewell gave his presentation exploring the differences between Scrum Masters and Project Managers, people were spilling into the hall. And this time, the attendees extended beyond the small cadre of folks who attended the Day 2 sessions and included folks like Jeff McKenna and Tobias Mayer. It was a lively discussion and raised a number of interesting ideas that seemed to center around the role of the PM/Scrum Master as an agent of change who is there to transform an organization, and enable them to become more “healthy”. If the PM/Scrum Master is to play that role, what is the best way to go about it? The session definitely helped bring to light the fact a lot of people are trying to figure out how to make sense of the whole idea of PMI and Scrum co-existing and how that impacts the person who is responsible for “leading” the effort.

After lunch there was a panel discussion with Ron Jeffries, Mike Cohn, Jim Coplien, Alistair Cockburn and Ken Schwaber. (For those of you keeping score at home, that is 3 of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto.) This was a very special gathering of some of the brightest thought leaders in the software world. They held court, debating and answering all the questions thrown at them. One of the best lines of the afternoon came from Ron Jeffries “There is no really good idea that can be measured by the number of people who adopt it.”

Once the panel was over we had a chance to do some video interviews that will be showing up in video podcasts very soon.

From the moment I arrived I felt challenged by the people I got to speak with and the ideas that were shared. It was my second Scrum Gathering and I find that it truly is a very organic moment of really sharp people who aren’t afraid to push each other. The only real complaint I heard the whole time was from one attendee who just wanted to be pushed even harder than he had been.

In a week or so I will have the video podcasts edited and posted. Until then, I want to say thank you to Greg Balestrero, Mark Langley, the IS SIG, the IT&T SIG, the steering committee of the PMI Agile Forum. We did well. People seem to be thinking it is okay to talk about PMI in the context of the Scrum Gathering. It may not entirely make sense yet, but the message that it was okay to try and figure it out was clearly heard.

I also want to thank the folks from the Scrum Alliance – especially Ken Schwaber, Mike Cohn, Jeff Sutherland, Jim Cundiff, Jodi Gibson and Stacia Broderick. I hope that we will be able to return the support and hospitality shown to the PMI community over the past few days.

I’m not sure how I am going to dry out from my recently developed Twitter addiction, but I will probably have to keep posting messages to @msliger, @mcottmeyer and @jessefewell until I can shake it off.

2009-03-17T22:30:00.004-05:00

Scrum Gathering - Day 2

Day 2 at the Scrum Gathering is about Open Space. If you’ve not been to one before, it is a very organic experience. There are very few rules, but one of them is that the attendees propose topics at the start of the day.

Jesse Fewell and I both stood up to propose topics. Jesse held a session for all the folks interested in PMIAgile and I held one that was intended to be a place where anyone who had issues or concerns with PMI attending the Scrum Gathering could come and talk about their issues with it. My hope was to capture the concerns and take them back to PMI.

There was a good turnout in the room and it was a very lively debate about the different ideas/concerns around the topic. These will all be posted to the wiki on the Scrum Alliance site as soon as I get home, but there were a few things that struck me today around the whole PMI and Scrum Alliance topic.

The first thing I noticed was that people keep getting hung up on the language issues and concerns about how to map which process to what in the other. This presents a significant hurdle for a lot of folks. “If I do X in your process what is that represented in my process?” The problem with this is that the real issue is not a semantic one, or a mapping one. The real problem is the fact that there is no focus on intent for the people in this conflict. Both approaches want to solve the project as quickly and efficiently as possible. There are different ways, but sadly, a lot of people are too busy making sure they are firmly planted in one camp or the other to understand that it really just does not matter because it is about doing the work.

Having typed all this, I should confess that I do have one concern coming out of day 2. I have had discussions with a number of folks about the role of a project manager in Scrum, or the role of a Scrum Master in project management. Each has a pure approach and for me, in what I do, I blend them together whenever and however I need to in order to get the work done. I do not feel compelled to take up for one side over the other and I don’t believe either is better than the other. I think it depends entirely on the people doing it. Two concerns here: 1) Most people are too caught up in semantics to worry about the intent to deliver and 2) How much of a threat is my approach to the purists? There are a lot of people worried about how PMI might impact the Agile space. There isn’t really anything in place to prevent something bad from happening beyond the people involved.

Anyway, I had some great conversations today, especially with Tobias Mayer, the folks who attended the Scrum Sessions and Michele Sliger.

One more day. I’m looking forward to getting some interviews tomorrow.

You can follow my twitter feed @pmiittelecom
Pictures will be posted to http://www.flickr.com/photos/pmiittelecom/
Or you can see both on the IT&T SIG website: http://www.pmi-ittelecom.org

2009-03-17T00:39:00.001-05:00

Scrum Gathering… Day 1
It was a very good day and I’ve been twittering under @pmiittelecom for most of it and will do so on Tuesday as well.
Some of my favorite moments from today…
Jim Coplien and Jeff Sutherland presenting “Not your Grandfather's Architecture: How MVC has evolved into the Agile world”. I walked in a few minutes late… just in time to hear Coplien say that any member of any scrum team should be able to explain the architecture on demand at any time. He said, if you can’t your team is sub-optimal. I think any time you can go to a conference where, within 15 seconds of walking into your first talk, someone has challenged the way you manage your work and look at the world, it is a very good thing.
……
Throughout the morning, there were a number of us twittering about the presentations. This led to a sub-conversation that rode underneath the actual presentations being given. Later, in the halls, we got to talking about whether or not it was rude for us to be typing in session, while people were talking. The general consensus was that it is. But, what if someone is twittering about your presentation? It is, basically promoting you – and giving you free PR. The consensus here, was that if the speaker didn’t know whether or not you were answering email or twittering, then they would perceive it as rude and that is why it is not a good thing (which none of us stopped doing all day). So, I’m wondering if it matters that the driver of good behavior, in this case, may not be the desire to be present and focus on the speaker and engage in their presentation, but simply to not appear rude to them.
……
Last year, I came to the Scrum Gathering as a kind of emissary on behalf of the IT&T SIG. I wanted to see if we could build a bridge between the IT&T SIG and the Scrum Community. Today, Greg Balestrero, the CEO of PMI gave the lunchtime keynote presentation. He did a very good job of engaging the crowd and conveying the message that PMI is an evolving organization that is interested in learning how to work with the Scrum Alliance. The response was very largely positive. People seemed generally hungry for things to move forward. The best part of his talk was the end where he paraphrased a conversation he and Ken Schwaber had held the night before. The basic message they wanted to jointly get across today was to tell everyone in both camps to “stop whining” and that they “have permission to move forward”. From my perspective, this is a very, very good thing.
……
One thing I saw today, that is something I’ve never seen at a PMI conference, was when one of the CST’s left lunch early because he was so worked up about what he’d been running through in his mind that he needed to leave the lunch to go put it down. It is very energizing to be around folks who are genuinely turned on by what they do.

The only drag so far was that Michele Sliger and Gabrielle Benefield both spoke at the same time I did. I would have like to have seen both of them present.
I’ll be posting more tomorrow and will be shooting some video interviews as well.

2009-03-15T22:48:00.003-05:00

Greg, Mark, Ken, Mike, Jeff, Jodi, Teresa, Jesse, Michelle, Stacia, Gabrielle, Bob, Laurentiu, the Board of the IT&T and IS SIGs, the PMI Agile Forum Committee, everyone at the Scrum Alliance, all who attended the special event this evening and most of all,

Jim C…

Thanks. There were two amazing launches this evening. I am quite proud to have witnessed both!

Dave

2009-02-20T07:21:00.000-06:00

Hi,

I'll be hosting a webinar today with Ken Schwaber, co-founder of Scrum.

The webinar will take place at 12 PM Eastern.

Please join in if you are free - here are the details:
http://tinyurl.com/ITTSIG-SchwaberWebinar

Thanks,

Dave