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.

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

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".

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.