My thoughts on PMI agile ( PMI-ACP )

When I first heard of PMI agile, I was really skeptical about it. I never thought I would explore it. My initial thought was, how much agile PMI can be?.. I’m sure I’m not alone; there are many others who thought the same, or may be still thinking the same.

When Dave discussed with me about the upcoming ACP+ CSM class we were to teach together in NY, was the first time I got any interest to walk through the PMI agile course content. When I read the content, I was impressed. They have thought of so many aspects to agile engineering and agile in general.

About the Exam:

As usual, Tools and Techniques cover 50% of the exam. These tools and Techniques are divided in to10 different knowledge areas. Rest of the 50% is allocated for the candidate’s knowledge and skills in agile project context, covering 3 levels based on importance.

When I read the content in detail, I can see that it covers lots of stuff, which we should know when we do agile engineering. It talks about many practical aspects including agile modeling, story mapping, estimation techniques and even EVM and ROI calculations in agile context. It’s pretty detail. these materials are available at PMI site.

However, these are my concerns;

1 . In a CSM class, No one can fail the assessment, so the class is not conducted to aim for grades but to learn the concepts. I know almost all CSTs are very keen on transferring basic agile concepts to their students. But looking at the nature of PMI exams, if PMI agile learning hours focuses on teaching tools and techniques to the candidates to score pass marks, then the whole concept of agile will be lost. In that case, how many ACPs will be truly passionate about agile will be a question. In the worst-case scenario, they will be learning to pass the exam but not to practice agile. This has a greater risk in South Asia where there is a highly certification-focused culture.

2. Who is going to conduct these classes? There are only very few CSTs available, so I’m sure PMI will allow PMP trainers to do PMI agile courses ( may be Im wrong, Im not very clear about the eligibility criteria yet), but some of the PMP trainers may haven't really experienced agile or seen the value of agile to teach agile. If they are going to read a book and teach agile without any practical experience that’s going to be a disaster.

3. How rigid the exam questions can be in an agile exam? That’s another aspect to think through when preparing ACP examination questions. Examiners may need to bring up more concepts in to test rather than the theory, which can be learned by reading the course content.

Of course there are prerequisites to take up the ACP exam. This requires sufficient work experience in doing agile projects. I only wish the candidates will follow the protocols instead using workarounds to complete the eligibility criteria.

During last 2 weeks, I met many people who talked about PMI agile. They all had their own opinions about PMI going agile. Following are some of the points I gathered from these small talks:)

Positive points;

1. Many agreed that It’s a good move. PMI is known by every part of the world, but agile alliance is not so big as yet outside USA. Therefore this is a good move to bring agile in to a vast community.

2. Some said that they would never consider doing anything with PMI if not ACP

3. Many agreed that collaborating with PMI, Agile alliance would achieve its vision by changing the way that people work.

4. Some of the PMI folks also mentioned that it’s a good move at the right time. Many large enterprises are moving towards agile, if PMI doesn’t collaborate, it could have been much more difficult for them.

5. I heard some comments from real enterprise project managers that their techies get in to agile and talk more about agile nowadays, so ACP will help them to bridge the gap.

Negative thoughts were;

Some saw ACP as mainly a money making effort by Just introducing another certification while some agile folks thought that ACP may kill the whole concept of agile and there will be a hardcore new agile group to come up soon.

My personal view is, that PMI getting in to agile is a good move., specially when it comes to enterprise level, it will add loads of value, but that all depends how PMI may execute this courses/Exams and its yet to be found-out. I see a good trend towards ACP already; there will be lots of registered candidates for the exams starting from next month onward. I may do the same.
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However, I really enjoyed doing our CSM/PMI Agile class in NY with Dave and some really cool 19 participants (most are PMPs) from various industries. Co-Training with an experienced CST was an amazing opportunity to improve my training skills. It was an exhausting exercise to cover-up most the stuff in 3 days. But we had lots of learning and fun. (Thanks to them for criticizing my white board skills so badly, every time I go in-front of the white board I remember you guys :) I really enjoy this group's enthusiasm on agile after taking this class, this group even started a new LinkedIn group to discuss matters among peers. I think they got the concept right; agile is all about sharing, learning and adapting.

Graffiti by Geeks

This is taken from Exilesoft Lunch room. How creative our geeks can be? .. they can scribble when ever they want to..Paint buckets are placed there for them.. I love this office... But I wish none of you will spot my spot on this wall.. :) Do you think this is a good stress relief activity ?

Agile 2011 – Salt Lake City

Back from agile 2o11, long flight back home and still I cannot sleep. I think I’m seriously jet lagged or tired. So I thought to write a small note on what I’ve experienced.
I like the venue, the hotel Grand America and Little America. It’s an extremely nice place. Salt Lake City was a very nice place to cruise around after the sessions with lots of local bars, restaurants and unforgettable local coffee places.

The conference organizers mentioned that there were 1600 attendees from 48 countries around the world this year. Of course it’s huge. Organizing a conference in this scale could have been really hard work.

Talking about the main part, the sessions:
I honestly think the number of parallel sessions could have been lesser than what we had this year. In most the sessions I noticed that there were very minimal attendees, the rooms were empty. By reducing the sessions, they could maintain the quality of the sessions too. Still I know some may not agree with me, as there are more options and topics, attendees will have a better choice to make.
I enjoyed all most all the sessions I attended, there were quite lots of useful things to learn. Most sessions were very interactive. Looking at some of the sessions, I still feel its better if they try to go deeper in to the subject matters instead discussing the problems what everybody knows about, because the agile users have matured over the years. I felt this in some of the sessions such as performance appraisals and agile coaching. This is something that review committees should discuss next year.
Incremental budgeting was one of the sessions I really expected to turn out well.
As a general comment from attendees, what I heard was that the technical sessions delivered met the expectations of the attendees compared to the sessions of the management track. Still, agile contracts and agile decisions were some of the good ones that I attended in the management track.

My session this year was about KANBAN and use of it in the organizational facilitating functions such as HR department. Its an experience stage presentation, so most the work had to be done before the conference. The paper is published in IEEE and it’s included in the conference CD with loads of other conference papers. Actually there are pretty good papers I spotted in this CD, I need more time to read them.

One of the highlights this year was 10-year anniversary of the signing of the Agile Manifesto "Park Bench" event where most of the original signatories presented in one stage, answering the questions from the attendees. I think that was an inspiring moment to agile enthusiastic.



I enjoyed the round table discussion by agile thought leaders. Once again I got the opportunity to enjoy listening to Dave West, a speaker I admire the most. His true passion, natural style and humor makes him an awesome speaker (that’s my personal view anyway :) ) However thanks to the lady who asked the question about their new research areas, I heard a lot of new stuff which I need to Google and learn more. What excited me the most was to know that use of agile in operational management was one of the new research areas they do (they mentioned some acronym which I cannot remember) My experience report this time was related to that, may be I need to work more on the same paper and practice it for one more year to advance it to the next conference. I don’t know.. Its just a thought..
Out of all 3 key note speeches, I managed to listen to only one which is about psychology: positive thinking.

Conference party was quite a nice experience. I think most the attendees had lots of fun.





I heard there were some really cool sessions in open Jam, one of it has been to present a technique to learn foreign languages without using translations, I wish if I could be in the session, but thankful to my friend who taught me about the technique later. I wish if I could catch up Norwegian language a bit using the same technique.

Using the conference for marketing activities has tremendously increased from last year to this year. Sometimes some of the agile coaches overselling themselves were quite disturbing.

Anyway it was a great conference. This is where I really absorb energy by meeting lots of passionate and enthusiastic people. I really enjoy it. I heard that next year conference chair is Mitch Lacey, Im sure he will do a great job and I look forward to agile 2012 in Texas.

Agile Project Management (CSM / PMI Agile)

This 3-day intensive workshop provides instructions on the key areas necessary to take on the role of leading or participating in teams utilizing Scrum and Agile. The session will cover the Scrum framework as defined by Scrum Alliance and include a review the material defined by the Project Management Institute’s PMI Agile Certification Examination Content Outline. The material will be presented through lecture, group discussion of case studies, and group exercises. Successful completion of this workshop will satisfy the requirements necessary to apply for Scrum Master Certification as well as the provide attendees with the Agile training hours required for the PMI Agile Certification Exam.

The course will be faciliated by Dave Prior, CST, PMP and Thushara Wijewardena, CSM, PMP

Participants who successfully complete this course will:

• Understand the dynamics of the Scrum framework and how to make use of the practices necessary to realize the benefits of an Agile approach
• Understand how to begin developing a plan to implement Scrum in their current work environment
• Understand the differences between Agile and a traditional “waterfall” approach to leading projects
• Understand the basic differences that are necessary in leadership style when managing projects using Scrum as opposed to a traditional approach
• Understand the structure PMI has defined for their Agile Certification Exam
• Understand key Tools and Techniques defined by PMI for their Agile Certification Exam
• Understand the Knowledge and Skills defined by PMI for their Agile Certification Exam
• Understand the Domains and Tasks defined by PMI for their Agile Certification Exam
• Meet the requirements for Certified Scrum Master
• Meet the training requirements for PMI Agile Certification

Lecture in Stockholm

Just a short update ...

I realized that its been a while and Ive not posted anything to the blog. Sorry for that, simply I was too tired to think or to write anything new due to many things happened lately.

After Exilesoft acquired Teamwork Technologies in Jan, the biggest challenge we’ve got is to merge 2 project offices with 2 different work cultures, project models and even new markets. Working towards building one agile project model across the new project office is interesting, still very much challenging. There are many aspects to it, such as

1. Change of thinking process

2. Time to build trust between each other in such merger( new colleagues and existing colleagues / with sales offices and new customers)

3. Effort involved in getting our new sales offices to buy in to agile models which were quite different to their existing sales model ( and doing it for the right reason, otherwise it will be really messy)

4. Level of agile maturity needed to be achieved by the staff and across the new organization.

5. Establishing agile Engineering practices across technical teams

......And many other.. More than anything..... the biggest challenge is to prove some clear benefit to techies, to the customers, to the management and to the sales offices of such transition. This will take lots of effort and time. Still I’m sure I will have stuff for a book when that’s achieved :)

I’m happy that we got a really good team working towards such exhausting, but interesting exercise for everyone.

Other than this extremely busy day today office life, there were few things I’ve been doing.. The paper I submitted to agile 2011 is now selected to present. Which is the biggest achievement of the year so far.. Ive got a very experienced “Shepherd” to help me with it (He works for MacAfee and expect to learn a lot from him) . Thanks to the stage producers for that.

I was planning to do PgMP this year .. still I couldn’t spend any quality time on that. So Im not too sure where I stand with it.

Further @mrsungo is working on some exciting stuff which I hope to participate in New York, on my way to Salt Lake city in August. That’s going to be an excellent experience to me.
So .. its all going good..Will post some interesting stuff soon ! :)

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 5 – HR KANBAN Board

Let’s talk about the HR KANBAN board. I explained the user stories which will go to the stack in my previous post.

We all met on the 1^st day, in front of the HR office glass wall. We divided the wall in to 3 main columns as follows;

Stack ( Where we put whatever comes out as user stories related to our HR

To do ( The most prioritized stories)

WIP (What we are working on)

Done (The completed ones)

We made the following format for each of the sticky we use..

Here you can see some of us getting the stack prepared..

We pasted all the prepared user stories in the stack. Now we go to do the following

1.Prioritize them

Prioritization is important, due to 2 things.. There can be very important user stories but still we could wait some time before we act on them. As an example, we have decided to create a new appraisal process for employees which will support agile team concepts in the organization. That’s a very important user story, but still we can have some lead time to start it due to the current process in place for this year. Let’s look at another user story; issuing the new version of “onsite travel guide” to the staff was a very high priority story as we had some upcoming onsite visits planned in some projects. So we managed to prioritize the stories based on the urgency as well as the importance of them.

Here we go prioritizing them...

2. Split them as smaller stories if they are too big to move.

This was a challenge. Can you imagine that.. ? Look at the previous user story I explained.. If we say “we need a new appraisal process which supports agile team concepts” that’s a very big user story..It will be harder to move the user story across the board. So its needed to decompose it in to a smaller level stories at the time of moving to “To Do”

If you look at the tasks under this appraisal user story, you can make few more sticky notes such as;

1. Review the existing appraisal process so that we can have a good idea about how people are appraised currently.

2. Discuss with the staff and find the areas where they like to be changed so that we can get good insights from stakeholders who will be appraised by the process

3. HR manager needs to talk with the Project organization so that she can understand the gap between the current process and the new process requirements.

Likewise.. We faced some big user stories which had to be decomposed.. and some smaller user stories which doesn’t need to be decomposed.

3. To do and WIP

How do we do that? Interesting.. initially we tried to limit the To do to 10 and WIP to 6. Any logic in that? NO.. We wanted to avoid committing to too many things which we cannot deliver but still to have sufficient amount of work and urgent work needed to get going.. But still .. we have not mastered the limiting skills J I will observe this further.. (Inspect and adapt ;-) )

4. Understand that there are tasks which will not be in the KANBAN board

due to 2 reasons;

1. Those tasks are way too small and routine.. so you anyway attend to them

It’s important to understand where we will draw the line for the KANBAN board otherwise you may flood it with all the smaller things you have to do during the day.. the purpose of us is not that.

2. When it comes to HR. In reality, there will be few tasks where visibility of them will be challenging even at management level.

Initially I explained one of the major challenges in our operations is that as its recognized as internal work.Unlike in projects, some of the initiatives never get completed due to other prioritized commitments … or drag too long..I think thats a common problem in any organization. But now.. all these stories are so visible..what we need is to measure the cycle time..

In my next post I will explain the challenges, benefits and other observations we had of our KANBAN board when we were proceeding daily..

Next:


Previous:

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 1 – How did it start?

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 2 – Why not scrum..?

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 3 – Looking at KANBAN..

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 4 – How did we implement it ?