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.

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

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...

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.

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/

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.

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...