A video of a SCRUM course in collaboration with ESPM

Here it is a second amazing video (the first was “Video of one of my course with ESPM“) of a SCRUM course in collaboration with the European School of Project Management.

 

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categories News | | datetime 28/02/2012 00:41 | comments Comments (0)

A burndown chart to help you to study

Do you need a an easy tool to help you schedule, monitor and eventually replan your study progress?

In September 2011 I participated in the ALE-Agile Lean Europe 2011 un-Conference in Berlin.
Many sessions were delivered (most of them were really very interesting) and I tried to attend to most of them. One the most fun and gorgeous, has been held by an agile coach (I do not remember his name…) and he explained how he used some agile principles and techniques to help his son to study and do the homework during the summer vacations.

One of the thing he explained was that his son had some books to read and the total numer of the pages were really a big number. He knew that one of the main problem with students, is the famous syndrome that Goldratt invented. In order to avoid any problem with such a syndrome, he decided to use a burndown chart to help the son keep focused, seeing the progress in term of page read and how many were still to be read.

He also created three different trend lines representing the paces (in SCRUM “velocity”): low, sustainable, high, every trend counting for a predefined number of page that would be read daily (e.g. low 10, sustainable 17, high 25).
This last improvement helped primarily to forecast for the finish date the son would have hit in case of different velocity and, furthermore, when he started to study he had an immediate and easy way to compare his progress against these trend lines.

Actually, I used this suggestion when studying for the PMI-ACP certification. Infact, I had to study several books in few months (hundreds of pages) and I would be sure to finish within february 2012.

One of the most valuable effect of using the burndown chart to help you study, is the psychological one: your progress is continuosly and pitilessly compared to the reference velocities and it helps to remain focused and to recover in case of delay.

Here it is a great anti-pattern to the Goldratt’s students syndrome!

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categories Advanced Skills, Agile PM, Essentials | | datetime 21/02/2012 06:25 | comments Comments (0)

The magic wand coaching technique

what to do if you find resistances in adopting new methodologies, approaches or simply accepting new knowledge?
When presenting a new concept or knowledge, it happens, really often indeed, that your interlocutors strive to accept it.
This because it’s actually and objectively difficult to transform any new knowledge into actions, moreover when such a new knowledge challange consolidated old habits.
The interlocutors (attendees to a course? team members? management?), infact, find an unlikely number of problems and alibis to avoid any change, telling you that such kind of things will not work with them, their situation or context don’t allow such a change, they do not have time for that, or any other excuse.
When facing this situation I use some coaching techniques to help the interlocutor to explore that minefield, in order to find alternatives, fresh ideas or solutions.
This, primarily, helps me to understand the underlying rationale, trying to find some fresh and detailed information in order to address and guide the communication with my interlocutor to overtake and avoid any barricade, barrier or impediment.
There are many techniques, in this post I’m going to talk about the ” Magic Wand” technique.
It happens that your interlocutor doesn’t want to change because he thinks that problems are only refferred to other factors: his boss, a colleague, the company, the environment, the aliens, etc.
Sometimes it’s true (the aliens), sometimes not (the remaining individuals).
In these cases I take a marker and launching it to that person, I say that such a marker is indeed a potent magic wand, which will help him to realize any wishes.
Then, I ask him to make wishes and tell to the wand HOW to change the problematic situation just expressed.
Most of the times, the person, asks for something impossible to realize due to lack of power: change the boss’s or colleague’s or management’s mindsets, behavior or approach, change any organization’s policies, culture and so on. But, even in these cases, it happens that some good material to work on, arises: worthwhile suggestions, ideas or considerations.
To help the person be more practical, effective and pragmatic, I introduce the concept of sphere of direct influence: the network of your direct peers/nodes or even indirect peers/nodes (only one level further) with which you are able to operate, communicate and act that is, actually, the only way you can really pursuit any change or goal.
Actually this network starts with the first level (you), goes through your direct peers (second level) and finishes with people connected through your direct peers (third level).
The closer are the peers of your network you have to influence, the better the chance of attaining the objectives.
So the rule in these case is: start from yourself, from where your are, now! And only then, try to influence your peers (directly or indirectly).
Infact, any change coming from the bottom side of an organization pyramid, can be globally instantiated only if working accordingly through such a sphere or network.
This can be accomplished only if we, as individuals, are the first that accept such a change, demonstrating publicly that such a change is in progress and witnessing it by expressing not instrumentally, new behaviors, approaches, methodologies, mindsets.
At this point, the benefits coming from the process of change are visible to everyone, they are under the sun.
Curiously, it happens that the other peers of your network, will start to become interested in such results and start to ask how you have achieved it. At this point, you should start to explain and spread this new knowledge to the others, giving support and, sometimes, a sort of guidance in pursuing the objectives.
That’s enough for this post.
I’m going to talk shortly about the other coaching techniques in some future posts.
Have fun! :)

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categories Advanced Skills, Human Resources, Tools & Techniques | | datetime 17/02/2012 08:50 | comments Comments (0)

Video of one of my course with ESPM

Promotional video of the European School of Project Management that indirectly promote me as one of its teacher.
Many thanks to ESPM.

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categories News | | datetime 14/02/2012 11:58 | comments Comments (1)

Reflections about the PMI-ACP Certification

Yesterday, I sustained the exam to attain the PMI-ACP (PMI Agile Certified Practitioner) certification and fortunately I obtained it.

Compared to the PMP (PMI Project Management Professional) exam, it’s obviously easier, because the scope of the agile “discipline” of project management is smaller that the traditional one.

Well, first of all you should start from the official PMI certification page: PMI® Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACPsm) in order to gather all the information regarding the certification, the exam and the requirements in terms of knowledge you should acquire.

You must answers to 120 questions (20 of them are not judged because they are experimental and treated as a survey).
When the exam starts, you have 3 hours to complete it (that is a long time, in my opinion).

I would start this post with some personal suggestions:

  • make the exam simulation in order to practice with the buttons and the way you can review the questions marked
  • even if you encounter questions that you are not sure about, choose the same an answer and mark it in order to review when finished. This because if you even run out of time, you will have 25% of probabilty to have choosen the right answer
  • before you start the exam, drink a coffé or a glass of water, eat a snak (fruit is better!) and, why not, go to the rest room. These, in order to have all the three hours available without interruptions and energy enough to avoid the concentration goes down

The questions were mainly relating to : scrum, xp, lean.
SCRUM, played a primary role: most of the questions I encountered were about roles, meetings, information radiators and rules of SCRUM.
Some questions were about XP: the roles, the practices (TDD, refactoring, pair programming, etc).
Some other regarded lean: lean portfolio management, the value stream mapping technique, the lean principles.
Then, I found some questions about story points: what they are, how they are used and represented. Hence, the planning poker game was cited as well.

Some other questions regarded the velocity and how it is used.
Some questions were arranged as exercises where you were asked to calculate the number of iterations with a well defined velocity or again how many stories the team should commited to having a predefined average velocity (remember the done rule and the fact that you can consider a story actully done, only if it satisfies all the prerequisites).

What was stressed in more that one question, is the importance of self-organization and the team empowerment and the role of the agile project manager (SCRUM Master) to behave as a facilator, coach and servant leader.

I found some questions regarding the risk burndown chart and the risk audit practice, things cited into the book of Michele Sliger (see the book list below).
Finally, it was stressed a bit the importance of the release planning ceremony (even if, actually, in SCRUM this is not a mandatory ceremony), meeting used to develop the product and release visions and the product roadmap.

This is the list of books I suggest (some of them are suggested by the PMI for this certification):

  • Managing Agile Projects, Sanjiv Augustine,  Prentice Hall PTR
  • Official Scrum Guide, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland,  Scrum.org
  • Agile Project Management with Scrum,  Ken Schwaber,  Microsoft Press
  • Agile Estimating and Planning,  Mike Cohn, Prentice Hall
  • Agile retrospective – making good teams great,  Esther Derby, Diana Larsen
  • The Software Project Manager’s Bridge to Agility, Michele Sliger and Stacia Broderick, Addison-Wesley
  • The Art of Agile Software Development, James Shore,  O’Reilly
  • Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game 2nd Edition, Alistair Cockburn, Addison Wesley
  • Coaching Agile Teams,  Lyssa Adkins,  Addison Wesley
  • Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterpise Agility,  Alan Shalloway, James R. Trott, Guy Beaver,  Net Objective Lean Agile series

I found very interesting the suggestions came from Sally Elatta regarding her retrospective about the exam and some study tips.

Ooh, I was forgetting: it could not be missing a question about the agile manifesto (one of the values in my case)!

This was my experience with the PMI-ACP Agile certification and, what about yours?

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categories Advanced Skills, Agile PM | | datetime 11/02/2012 22:30 | comments Comments (3)

PMI-ACP Certification Achieved

The journey is finished, the objective attained: the PMI-ACP certification is finally mine :o )

 

 

Within few days I’m going to issue a post containing the details of my preparation…stay tuned!

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categories News | | datetime 10/02/2012 18:36 | comments Comments (3)

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