P2P Global conference 2009

P2P 2009 Global project management conference is scheduled to be held in Cairo on 2nd, 3rd and 4th November at Hotel Marriot.
You can find more information about the conference on http://p2p.brisk-consulting.org/details_sp.php

I will be addressing the conference in 3 sessions and I will be doing my presentations based on following abstracts.
http://www.p2pevents.net/p2p/main.php?page_label=Thushara%20Wijewardena
Software project management in outsourced project environment and Risk mitigation.
Outsourced projects over geographical boundaries have been always a challenge when it comes to project management. Either large scale or small scale, the risk of the project failures remain the same.
The presentation will discuss the challenges which project managers’ may face for the projects outsourced over boundaries and the common risk factors based on experience gained by managing and consulting various outsourced projects over a decade for a global clientele.
The Risk involved in outsourced projects from both customer and the software vender, the culture difference and how to overcome issues, communication, working with time differences, working with unknown parties, trust, and security issues in such projects will be discussed in details.
Further the challenges in Agile and waterfall methods in outsourced project environments will also be discussed.
The topic will be much related to the connected chapters as emerging software outsourcing markets.

Introducing Scrum to Your Organization
Successfully introducing Scrum into a non-Agile environment can be a very complicated endeavor. This presentation will cover critical areas of focus, risks and challenges your organization may face when crossing the bridge to Agile. This lecture will include an examination of the transition to Agile from the perspective of the organization as a whole, as well as individual stakeholders.

Effective Communication When Using Scrum
Communication is an important aspect of project management. According to the PMBOK, Project Managers spend 80-90% of their time communicating. When working with a lightweight Agile framework like Scrum, the risk of miscommunication can increase significantly if you aren’t vigilant about your messaging. This session will discuss the opportunities and risks a project manager faces when working with the Scrum framework. Participants should leave this talk with a deeper understanding of the risks to watch out for, as well as the new opportunities for enhanced communication that are created by using one of the most popular Agile methodologies.

Its my first time to address such a big conference and I wish I have enough time for preparations. :-)

P2P 2009 Global project management conference is scheduled to be held in Cairo on 2nd, 3rd and 4th November at Hotel Marriot.
You can find more information about the conference on http://p2p.brisk-consulting.org/details_sp.php

I will be addressing the conference in 3 sessions and I will be doing my presentations based on following abstracts.
http://www.p2pevents.net/p2p/main.php?page_label=Thushara%20Wijewardena
Software project management in outsourced project environment and Risk mitigation.
Outsourced projects over geographical boundaries have been always a challenge when it comes to project management. Either large scale or small scale, the risk of the project failures remain the same.
The presentation will discuss the challenges which project managers’ may face for the projects outsourced over boundaries and the common risk factors based on experience gained by managing and consulting various outsourced projects over a decade for a global clientele.
The Risk involved in outsourced projects from both customer and the software vender, the culture difference and how to overcome issues, communication, working with time differences, working with unknown parties, trust, and security issues in such projects will be discussed in details.
Further the challenges in Agile and waterfall methods in outsourced project environments will also be discussed.
The topic will be much related to the connected chapters as emerging software outsourcing markets.

Introducing Scrum to Your Organization
Successfully introducing Scrum into a non-Agile environment can be a very complicated endeavor. This presentation will cover critical areas of focus, risks and challenges your organization may face when crossing the bridge to Agile. This lecture will include an examination of the transition to Agile from the perspective of the organization as a whole, as well as individual stakeholders.

Effective Communication When Using Scrum
Communication is an important aspect of project management. According to the PMBOK, Project Managers spend 80-90% of their time communicating. When working with a lightweight Agile framework like Scrum, the risk of miscommunication can increase significantly if you aren’t vigilant about your messaging. This session will discuss the opportunities and risks a project manager faces when working with the Scrum framework. Participants should leave this talk with a deeper understanding of the risks to watch out for, as well as the new opportunities for enhanced communication that are created by using one of the most popular Agile methodologies.

Its my first time to address such a big conference and I wish I have enough time for preparations. :-)

Project Management 2.0

The talk of the town ! Project Management 2.0 :-)
Yea we all know that Project management has moved a long way from traditional management and those long gone methods are not recognized anymore. The days that project manager becomes the center for all the information and he filters information for various stakeholders and make stake holder updates are long gone. In modern project management, information transparency is provided to all the stakeholders by the project itself and there is no central control of information by the project manager. Everybody becomes equally intelligent about the project and all the stakeholders contribute to the success of the project due to high degree of transparency.
Okiii…what’s so big about Project Management 2.0.? Actually I don’t see anything big .. But it’s a name given for using social media for project management ( I know Wiki will not tell you the exact words , But this is simply the idea about it .)
Oki.... this is what Wiki tells you..
“Project Management 2.0[1] (social project management[2]) is the natural evolution of project management practices brought by Web 2.0 technologies “
I think this is a very cool concept..You can see many project managers moving out of complex tools, stake holder reports, various templates to simple tools like Twitter , Wiki , facebook ??:-), blogs ..sounds funny ? No its not..
Ok I know your first question.. Where is the security of your project info?
You know that you can protect your twitter updates and discuss about the project status updates etc among the team members? Honestly I have not done that yet… but today I talked with one of my PM friends in Florida who does that in his projects.. When one of his team members travelling with a blackberry, instead opening a complex Excel sheet, he can get in to his favorite twitter.. How easy for you to see what happened in your project and status updates and with a simple twitter..?
(Oh I remember that I had a discussion with somebody lately about Twitter/ FB type look and feel for business applications.. And that person just ripped me off to pieces for bringing up this thinking for business applications… It just came to my mind when writing this post.. Anyway forget it ….not relevant here sorry …lets get back to Project Management 2.0 :)
I heard that most the complex tools even with portfolio management features are now trying to integrate with social media. Example :Facebook. .. Wow ..here you go…..
How does that happen..? hmmm ...I can use my fantasies and think of many ways..:-)
One thing I learned.. you can have facebooks created for your team working around the world., In a construction project, if you need to take pictures of current problems, installations, uploaded to the software and publish directly via facebook to your whole team located in several parts of the world. They will see all the updates instantly… Isnt it cool :-) ?
If you want to learn more about project management 2.0 there are lots of resources available in the web.., I find my friend, Cornelius’ latest 2 podcasts (find them at http://www.pmpodcast.com/) is really cool sources for this. At the same time I see Dave and many other professionals around the world posted some good stuff to the web. Ask Google more about it :-)

What is a dumb question..?

Ok first of all I don’t believe there are any dumb questions.. Its only dumb people. No questions are dumb. But people who don’t question are really dumb.
As a project Manager /Scrum master you need your team members to ask questions. You need your product owner /customer to ask questions.. you need your senior management and other stakeholders to ask you questions. If they don’t question and if they don’t ask questions freely , the payback you have will be too much for you to handle at the end of the project.
So how do you get people around you to question you ..? Its very simple... Create that environment around the project. Make it a project culture.. Every team member should be able to question about each other and about the product.. and about the requirements.
To my surprise I have come across with many project managers who create a shield to prevent others questioning about the project by being defensive for questions. This is really a bad syndrome. They have no idea how others around them could really help them to get them on line. Early awareness about issues to the management and to the customer really help to find solutions before its too late.
I still cant understand why a project manger cannot show his or her application design to a business manager.. and questions such as .. by looking at from the outside , do you think that this is user friendly enough ? Do you see any risks in this schedule which I have not seen so far.. its really important for a project managers to create this situation in any project. We all know scrum facilitate this situation. But unfortunately all the projects under the sun are not proper scrum projects. So no matter what the methodologies you use or technologies you use, it’s totally up to you to create enough transparency about your projects to encourage questions.