PMI-NIC Agile Project Management

During this year I participated in several agile events. Some of them were arranged by agile organizations, some other self-organized by agile communities. December the 2nd I participated to an agile event organized by the PMI (indeed it was the Northern Italy Chapter).

The event was interesting to me because of three major reasons: the international speakers who have been participated, the fact that I had have the opportunity to present my personal experience with agile to an international audience and, finally, the fact that one of the PM communities to which I belong to, the first membership actually, demonstrated interest and proactivity in surfing the agile wave.

One of the speaker was Sanjiv Augustine, the author of the first book I read, several years ago actually, regarding agile topics: “Managing Agile Projects”.

I found that book very interesting because it describes with a high degree of detail the way how agile practices could be applied to the software development process, reporting examples from real working life, but also it explains very well more absctract concepts such as complex agile systems, but in a pragmatic and concrete way.

Sanjiv is a superb speaker. During his intervention he gave to the audience, a huge quantity of qualitative information providing time to time, also specific cases and examples that helped to fix the knowledge just acquired.

My speach, instead, was about the role of the product owner in SCRUM and how it can be adjusted in order to facilitate the communication, the collaboration and the sinergies with the customer.

The assumption I did was that even if most of the benefits coming from SCRUM are due to sticking to the rules and observing the whole process, it could happen indeed that the customer doesn’t want to be so much involved in agile or, furthermore, that he is fond of the traditional way of managing projects.

Even in these case we try to adapt out behavior to the situation, trying to:

deliver value to the customer in a steady pace
involving as much as possible the customer with agile
adopting the communication style to and supplying project progress data the customer wants (adopting the “barely sufficient approach” Alistair Cockburn suggests)

Finally, I was very happy to find many people so much enthusiast in the agile topics and, moreover, the fact that the PMI-NIC has been and will be, one of the change agent of the agile transformation, at least in Italy.

Tags: #PMIAgileCert, agile p.m., PMI, PMI-NIC, product owner