World is bigger.. Its bigger than SCRUM..

Did you hear about the facebook addicted criminals story on Sheryl's keynote speech at Advertising Week! (She is the COO of Facebook. She explained a true story of a criminal entering to a house, seen facebook in the computer. Logged in to it but didn’t log out ! :) He must be a Facebook addict like me.
Ok where did this Facebook story came up.. Ok.. Now I can remember , I saw someone’s FB status said today that treat every problem as an opportunity. I believe in it ! I have been always whining about my home only weekends.. But now Ive kept my whining aside and learned to use it as an opportunity to spend little time on reading..
Never mind all that.. Lets get in to the point.. Scrum and Kanban.. I see some heated up discussions going on….!. Its sad that some people believe that scrum is a god given solution to all the problems.. Scrum is great and it works in the right context! But not in all the contexts. I saw an article published by Crisp.se, they ask what do you think is the best tool … Fork or spoon? Good example. I know It’s a senseless question. So if you ask me again what’s best Scrum or Kanban I would say it’s a senseless question.(But I admit that I have not used Kanban in practice) But if you ask what’s much more prescriptive, definitely I can see that Scrum is more prescriptive than Kanban. However all the agile methods are much much less prescriptive than waterfall methods and that’s why those are mostly referred as light weighted methods. When the prescriptiveness is less in a tool, one should use more creativity and brain to make it work, but you get less constraints and high freedom.
Scrum works perfectly in product development.. But I can foresee its definitely going to be failed when you cannot plan proper sprints, when you can’t have that committed time for committed user stories. The best example is maintenance projects. How long you can commit to ? 1 month sprint ? 2 weeks sprint .. No.. most the time you cant go beyond 1 day I suppose.
In the article written by Henrik Kniberg, about how you can make scrum works with Kanban, he describes the adaptiveness and prescriptivenss of various methods beautifully. There he compares RUP , XP, SCRUM , KANBAN, and another Agile method called Do what ever :) ( which most of us are frequently used to :)) He rates the Prescriptive to adaptiveness scale of these methods as RUP (highest 120+ ) XP (13) Scrum (9) , Kanban (3) and Do what ever as 0 . As he says “RUP is pretty prescriptive – it has over 30 roles, over 20 activities, and over 70 artifacts, this may be one reason why RUP implementations end up being heavy weighted compared to Agile methods such as SCRUM and XP”

The main difference between XP and scrum is that , XP stress on how to do work such as test driven development and pair programming.. But Scrum doesn’t tell us about how we should do development. So scrum is definitely going to be more adaptive than XP.

Lets look at RUP and SCRUM now.. Most the time Im in firing line about Scrum as most my colleagues are coming from "sort of RUP" environment. I had an interesting discussion today with a PM friend from my PM network, he said RUP is like a dish with too much of salt and SCRUM is like a dish with too less salt. You will not eat both as it is.. there are so much you should take out when you are implementing RUP , same time you need to add bit more essence to SCRUM when you are implementing it in practical environment. (Read my previous post about SCRUM and test cases/use cases.)

Ok looking back to Kanban, Kanban also looks very attractive to a less process person like me LOL

The main differences Ive understood In Kanban compared to SCRUM is that;
1. Scrum tells you when to do planning , when to do the retrospective when to do the next sprint planning.. in Kanban you do as you see the requirement for it
2. In Scrum you are focused on delivering what you are committed to sprint, you do your best.. deliver what you can , next sprint you see how to improve, you measure this by velocity of a sprint, in Kanban you limit your Que in a workflow state. As an example you can say you can’t have more than 2 to do items in the item dashboard at any given time. But in Scrum you commit to user stories and you control the work to do by committed user stories.
My personal view is that Scrum is somewhat lean(But I know there are lots of arguments over this at the moment.) However Kanban is much more Lean than Scrum for sure.
Kanban don't stress about time boxing as far as Scrum revolves around it , Kanban cares about lead time.
To me as I read Kanban can be scaled much easier for multiple teams. But I need to experiment more on that.

I think this is one reason why I think Kanban can be a help in maintenance type of projects when Scrum becomes challenging.. However today there are lots of mix marriages.. Mix when you want to get the best out of them.. I had a waterfall team who had 15 min stand up meeting every morning.. Im going to have scrum teams who will use use- cases for user stories from RUP process. Now I don’t mind combining Kanban with Scrum when its needed.. ! All what matters is the success of the project. All these are tools for you to use them right to get in there.

Following diagram is taken from http://www.infoq.com/articles/hiranabe-lean-agile-kanban

International Project Managers day 2009.

International Project Managers day is scheduled for 5th November. ( Cool :) Like Moms day , Fathers day, valentine’s day. … PMs who are always in firing line also should have a day for them I believe :)
There is a very good webcast program which you can join on 4th and 5th November.. the great project management professionals such as Gregory Balestrero - President and CEO, Project Management Institute are scheduled to give speeches on this.
You can find more info on this at http://www.iil.com/ipmday2009/webcast.asp

Online Exam for Certified Scrum Master

the Scrum Alliance Board of Directors (Board) has decided to move forward with the launch of the online Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) exam on October 1. For more details Visit Scrum Alliance web page.

Scrum and Documentation.(use cases/ test cases). ?

I know I was suppose to write few posts totally focused on practical aspects of user stories. But I thought to write this post first, because last week I had an interesting discussion at office which could be really useful to other agile practitioners as well.
We were talking further about agile testing. Especially with Scrum. We do have a separate well focused QA team managed by an experienced QA lead. In our model, the QA department is independent from any projects and they directly report to the Project Director. So how does this model work with SCRUM? I find sometimes its bit contradicting with concepts. We know Scrum has cross functional teams and each developer is responsible about their Quality. However, there can be testers too working in scrum team full time, they will be team members within the scrum team and coordinate with the scrum master. But if the QA department runs separately how do we do that? We had 2 options. Running 2 scrum teams for same project, you can call it scale up scrum, one for QA and one for Development, then have scrum of scrum everyday to synchronize with 2 teams. The 2nd option was for QA team to give permanent QA resources to each scrum team and they will apart from the QA department. In that case it would be an organizational change as well as we will be losing the concept of the power of an independent QA team who certify the delivery before delivering to the end customer.We thought of maintaining the same independent QA team and still to run Scrum ( if you don’t like me calling scrum for this method.. sure .. you can call it something different.:). ) But then the biggest problem is that how the QA team members get the knowledge of the product? Because, in a Scrum team the documentation is very less. We don’t create lengthy specifications and pass them over the wall. Then how does my independent QA team get this knowledge from the development team who participate the Product backlog planning meetings and sprint planning meetings.The following are the points we discussed;
1. One QA member of the QA dept participate the product backlog meetings as well as sprint planning meetings.
At the product backlog planning meeting, the assigned QA member with the team will decide which user stories will need use cases. Further, we discuss about using some very light weighted use case only when required. You can find a good article on some light weighted use cases for Scrum in http://breathingtech.com/2009/writing-use-cases-for-agile-scrum-projects/

2. Once the product backlog planning is over , the QA team member who participated the product backlog meeting will educate the QA dept head about the scope of work in QA dept with regard to the project.
3. In the sprint planning meeting, when the team decides of which vertical to be focused on, the team will create those use cases only for the specific selected vertical for the particular sprint. For that sprint, the sprint should have tasks and enough space to complete the use cases. In this case sometimes we may have to go away from our usual 2 weeks sprints to 4 weeks sprint.

4. Once the team finishes the required use cases, they will sign in to development tasks. The QA will have tasks to create the test cases during the sprint. So now we have test cases too.
5. Once the iteration is done (At the end of the sprint), the development team delver the shippable product increment to the QA department. , One of the tradeoffs is that this will delay the customers immediate delivery at the end of the iteration by few days.. But as a company, we need to assure the quality of what we deliver to the customer by our focused QA unit. I think this is better , so in this way, customers product quality is basically assured 2 times. Which enable us to deliver a very good quality product to the customer.

6. This QA dept quality checking also can be time boxed to few days as there cannot be such a bottleneck for the product owner to test the vertical.

I can see we can eliminate few practical problems in Scrum model by using few extra steps. Because we all may not have that “Luxury of right context” for scrum in real world business.

Scrum... never ending questions !! “yeah It’s a framework :)

Someone had an argument with me about something I mentioned about scrum at some place.. ( Ok I would call it a “discussion” :-)) I love when someone challenges me on something what I talk about..!
Ok the “conversation” I had is this;
I said the scrum project starts only when the Product backlog is ready !! Im sure Im correct.. Ken Schwaber said it better way than me.. (Obviously he should! )…“The minimum plan necessary to start a Scrum project consists of a vision and a Product Backlog “sounds clear..!
The point is that, in business, we position ourselves as a total solution provider in software. Specially in Outsourcing business where we are in to, the product owner becomes a role from the customer’s business manager or the product manager. Because the total understanding and the product vision is very difficult to be transferred to another person who is outside the geography boundaries as he has no much understanding about the target market. ( we could hire someone from the customer location as a consultant for sure, but its not a practical solution for every project we do )

We all know that Product owner is never a part of scrum team. Ok then, do we leave the product owner to create the product backlog in that case? Do we have product owners who has enough time and knowledge to do the groundwork which is required to come up with the product backlog?

I thought this would help many readers who are about this pre stage of scrum.

The point is Yes ! Scrum doesn’t stop the team getting involved with doing necessary mind mapping work, wire frames , use-cases and other background work to help the product owner to get the user stories of the product done.. But those tasks will not happen within the scrum project. In scrum project everything is time boxed. We have a planning meetings within defined time , we have tasks to be executed ( sprint) within defined time and we have a scrum day within a defined time. So we know exactly how time is taken for these specific user stories to be developed in scrum. However, the pre tasks such as helping the product owner to get the user stories ready can be done with the team involvement, and then the question is “when the team can get involved with the process”
It can happen at anytime, but the latest is the product backlog planning meeting . Then the question comes.. How long time is needed to come up with the user stories? I don’t think any Scrum guru can give an answer to that..( I learned during my CSM that there is an easy answer for all the difficult questions in scrum – the answer is “it depends”)

Actually the time needed to come up with user stories really depend on the knowledge of the product, availability of other stakeholders, business environment, and many other factors. I don’t think the time you spend to come up with Product A for 100 user stories will have any relationship to the time you need to come up with Product B :100 user stories. Otherwise there could be already set benchmarks in the industry for time to create user stories. Which is never the case.

User stories - Do they need a format ?

Every person whom I meet teaches me how much I don’t know about some subject. Either its about the world, history, culture, religion, different industries… whatever it is…This happens to me all the time when travelling. I have some luck to have good company most the time while travelling or in transit. Those strangers ended up being my “friends” frequently.

This time when I was travelling from Frankfurt to Doha, Some stranger fell in to conversation with me after seen my notebook bag ( I think I have mentioned about this notebook bag before in this blog J ) He assumed that I work for an IT company and he is an Agile management consultant based in Denmark and travelling to Doha for some assignment. You can imagine now.. a conversation in a long flight extended by 1 hour delay J

It was very interesting to know about various experiences we both had with Scrum and he was quite used to many other agile methods which I have never been exposed to before. However we both agreed that Scrum is the most popular Agile (According to him.. “The well marketed and money making Agile”) right now.

Talking about various experiences I asked his experience about user stories. This was some challenging area in Scrum projects. Getting the user stories right…

I always believed its better to have the standard for user stories “ As a “, “I need to “ “So that I can”.. In this way the requirements become much clearer to everyone and we may not miss the users what their expectations etc.. But he disagreed. I was surprised, but he had a valid argument on this. Example: As a Job applicant I want to post my CV to the job portal so that the prospective employers can view my CV in PDF format”

His argument was that its always difficult to stick with real users in user stories. As an example; you want to have date widgets in an application, so that do you write “as a designer I want to use the list of widgets so that “…….. ??? Where is the real user in this user story? ? I couldn’t agree less. Because I just completed a project initiation where there were many many user stories which I couldn’t think of mapping to my standard template originally but I had to do it by force with tweaking them by using developers, designers , architects as types of users which may not be the best case.. He also had the same experience .. One of his initial product backlogs 80% of the time it has been “ As a product owner “ which doesn’t make any sense…J

But then.. Million dollar question.. Why Mike Cohn standardized that user stories in a standard way? Didn’t he see this problem? I don’t think so .. Need much more thinking and reading on this.. may be some times not using standards would be better than using standards if they are not meaningful.. I will definitely do a follow-up post on this..

Anyway bottom line out of scrum is that speak to anyone who try to make a conversation with you…never know what they will come up with J

Yeah Im not a person who can live with open ended questions.. So Im chasing answers:

28th June..

Follow up today : I purchased the book from Amazon "User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development " by Mike Cohn

29th June

I found this article :

Missing Dimention of user stories : Interesting thoughts:

Another Scrum project initiation

Very interesting project to work with some cool robots :-) and nice people. and more than anything the office is located in a beautiful area..I love this trees houses, plants, flowers..and seen 2 apple trees today while walking to find the train station . its a picture book enviorenment outside :-) and I love them all... Ok..I had a good start today. The customer is located in Norway. Working with other nationalities for some challenging tasks specially working in the project initiation stage where you need to understand the project context and stakeholders clearly and come up with the best customized model for the right context and drive everyone towards it.. That fascinates me all the time. This time it was not that hard as Ive experienced with some projects before.. Most the facts were straight.. When I listened to all the discussions going around I spotted some mostly used keywords by the people;
- Working with Verticals
- Collaborative team- Prioritization- Incremental product deliveries- fear for the risks with offshore model- Difficulties of limiting the scope or defining at once- The visibility of the value out of work.
Further I observed there seems high degree of commitment and enthusiasm by the customer team for the project. So now that its clear I wouldn’t go for any waterfall project initiation in this context. You can see that very clearly. We agreed on Agile (ok - scrum) due to many reasons.
Working with Offshore model is never like working with collocated teams. Offshore itself is very challenging when it comes to Software projects. The biggest problem you experience in offshore model is that isolation after initial study at customer location which leads to most the project failures. The old saying “Out of sight is out of mind” is proven again and again in most the offshore projects. Therefore it’s a key factor that we need to use a work model which doesn’t give that chance of getting isolated though you are in a different geographical location. Scrum facilitates that.
IBM scrum community guide for scrum in distributed team context gives lots of insights about distributed teams using scrum even with teams where there is no overlapping time zones. But I don’t think that’s a good idea anyway unless one team is willing to scarifies their off time – It’s a different discussion anyway.. Point here is that you can see many distributed teams around the world moving towards agile due to this “Out of sight” risk factor.
Ok coming back to my project, the team model, either its going to be 2 scrum teams in 2 locations and working for verticals and then doing scrum of scrums or whether both country resources working in one team with one scrum master and product owner. Both the options its important that you share one product backlog and commit to stories instead having 2 product backlogs.
I have chosen the 2nd option by keeping provision to go for the 1st option when the teams start to grow. We can scale up the model when there were more team members are added to the teams.
Identifying the product owner and the scrum master is another important thing as you identify the Project manager in waterfall project initiation. I always agree with scrum experts that Product owner is the most difficult role to be played in a scrum team.
Product owner is a person who needs a mix of skills, he needs to have a good business vision, Project skills and he is the person who has the final “say” of the product in a scrum team by coordinating with many other stakeholders. Compared with traditional work we did before this is like Scrum team is transferring the risks of requirements outside the team to the Product owner (Yes its Risk transferring up to an extend I should say )
In this project I managed to spot a Product owner after our initial discussions and thank god he agreed to play the role. ! Im so happy about that because I saw that clear idea about what they need is mostly lies with him. So his main tasks would be now to create themes, assigned values with other stakeholders, prioritize them.. After that we will be discussing about his release plan and then set the product backlog accordingly.
Identifying scrum master – in this team model should he be in Norway or in SrI Lanka. Looking at the current context we decided that the scrum master should come from Norway team. Which is a good decision for the model 2 right now. Further he has experience using scrum so it will be a good choice. I have 4 more days to go.. Not full days.. its challenging to do the rest of the tasks left to complete during rest of the days.. I need to structure my time well to prioritize on what I have to do. Stakeholder reporting and training team on scrum values and disciplines is another vital task requested to do at the initiation. Need to look at the risk analysis too. So I have few busy but “my kind of work” ahead :-)

Will Scrum scare away the PM .. I say BIG NO

Recent past this has been a very painful discussion in many organizations moving towards Agile.. What are we to do with our PM? Is he/she going to be a Product Owner, Scrum Master or will work as the developers of the team with his skills of development , testing etc. ? All that is fine.. But don’t forget about the Planning, Leadership, Risk Management and Project knowledge what your PM has gained over the years which is really helpful even in a scrum team for a medium to large scale projects. I understand there is no logic in converting PM to Scrum Master unless he understands and capable of playing this “servant based leadership” (they call it ) role.
Look at the following Scenario what we need to do when following a scrum project from top to bottom,

Product Vision -Themes -Values -Roadmap -Release plan -User stories -Product backlog - Sprint Backlog - Daily Scrum

Most the early stage work is the main responsibility of the product owner, however when you look at making release plans based on business values, budgets, stakeholder requirements, PO needs lots of support from the team as well as support from an experienced project manager would be invaluable. PM comes with lots of experience in foreseen risks, keeping team together with good spirit, protecting team from outside disturbances, being visionary about the project and specially some instincts about team skills J , So in that case I think a PM skills can be used in many ways as a very important role for scrum teams specially if there are many scrum teams involved in a project. One way to position him is to be outside of the team, acting a coaching role to help the PO in various scenarios throughout the project. But if the PM can be converted to a good scrum master who will serve this "Servant based leadership" the value he or she can provide is really good when compare with a techie who has no much experience of looking at the project perspectives becoming a scrum master.. I think its all about a mentality change which needs to play this new role by using your valuable skills. There are quite lot of opportunities for a skilled PM in agile environment either outside the team as a coach to work with PO or inside the team as a Scrum master.

WOW !!! is Scrum Alliance is all about money ???

I was thinking of upgrading my Scrum master status to Scrum Practitioner and I did the case study which was provided to gain the status., Following is the email I receieved from Scrum alliance today after inspecting the case study...

Hi Thushara,Congratulations! Your application has been approved. The next step is to submit payment of $250 to complete the process. You can do so by clicking on the link below.

http://www.regonline.com/csp_applfee2009



Once you've submitted payment your profile should be updated within one week. Your SA profile will show your new CSP certification status and your certification will be effective for a duration of 2 years. If you have any questions regarding your profile, please direct them to @scrumalliance.org.


Feel free to contact me if you have questions.



Warm Regards,

Scrum Alliance Certification Administrator


I think when you think "Agile " this fee is way out :-)
And further if you are interested to get CST , in SL money you got to pay Rs 80K + and again this CSP validity is only for 2 years. Im thinking whether its worth to upgrade to CSP or not now. Becuase I have to maintain many professional titles from various professional bodies and the anual charges to maintain them is already too much.. :-) and I rarely use the titles.. unless the rule says its a must :-)

Individual Appraisals in an Agile Team

Thanks to my Project Managers.. They asked me this question lately when I was talking about scrum for upcoming projects.. How do we conduct the annual appraisals of the individual team members when practicing Agile?.. Specially Scrum. Because I have been chanting the mantra all the time ....."Scrum is all about team and not about individuals. :-)....
We could think of many ways , But I wanted to get to know about how other industry experts who practice Scrum do this. I asked few people , Mostly they all had the same answer , “if you win as a team you win. If you fail as a team you fail. What’s the purpose of the appraisal if your product is not delivered” But the problem is that almost all of them are in to different work culture and I find its difficult to practice the same principles they practice when it comes to SL context. At least till we get in there.

I found some very good sources here for individual appraisals in Agile environment. Hope this will help you to build a appraisal system for your Agile team members.

http://runningagile.com/2008/01/22/review-process-for-agile-team-members/

http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/8-should-a-scrummaster-give-performance-appraisals

http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/50-performance-without-appraisal

http://www.agilemalta.com/agile-employee-reviews-and-appraisals/

The Scrum Team

Scrum teams do not include any of the traditional software engineering roles such as programmer, designer, tester, or architect. Everyone on the project works together to complete the set of work they have collectively committed to complete within a sprint. Scrum teams develop a deep form of camaraderie and a feeling that "we're all in this together."

A typical Scrum team is 6-10 people but Jeff Sutherland has scaled Scrum up to over 500 people and I have used it with over 150.

- Mountain Goat software

Scrum ?

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 :-)

Revamping of Projectized..

Yesterday one of my colleagues was discussing some stuff on this blog and I got some exiting comments about how popular this is in some of the search engines. I was very happy by the comments because I can see over hundreds of people visiting this blog every day but very few times my colleagues refer to it or comment about it J So thanks for the comments..
Anyway I looked at this blog today and I think I need to care about her little more.. I just felt that I don’t give a fair care on it.. Obviously its due to my other priorities. Now it’s that high time I need to think of revamping the blog as.....

1. I earn from the blog more than I ever expected now. Thank you for my advertising sponsor and the kind readers who purchase the courses. I think this can be further improved.

2. I have messed up with blog links.. Many readers have commented that some of the links don’t work but I have been too bad I have not even replied to them with a thank you note and corrected those links.

3. Some outdated material need their reference to new material

4. My profile has been changed.. need updates

5. Need more linking up and some marketing gadgemetics inserted in this :-)

6. I should stop posting un related posts and be focused on PM posts

7. Im screwed up with tags.. I need to sort them out, which is number 1 priority.

8. I need to provide reference articles to blog posts for some of the sites who have requested them

9. Most importantly I need to link up with PMI chapter and blog

10. Need to do something to keep interactive with the readers.

Ok Im thinking to revamp it in 2010 :-)