I just got back from the Rochester PMI Chapter’s Professional Development Day. I must say I was very impressed with the organization of the event, the number of participants (over 250) and the level of interest. Both sessions of mine were filled up. Thanks to everyone who attended. As promised, I have posted a copy of my deck here

Techniques for Agile Project Managers - This presentation has some introductory content and then discusses some of the key practices needed to help a team self organize and be effective.

Well, it’s been a marathon weekend with back to back sessions at the SNEC and Mass Bay PMI Chapter’s professional days. I’ve always enjoyed these sessions and these two were no exceptions. I got to have some intriguing conversations and meet many interesting people. In an effort to not overwhelm people’s in-boxes, I deemed it prudent to post my slides here rather then distribute them in emails. more »

Like many other Agile practitioners, I have seen too many cases where an organization wants to adopt Agile, but believes that all they need is a little training. Of course, the most extreme would be when a group believes they can send one person off to become a Certified ScrumMaster and then they can simply train everyone else. While this intuitively sounds foolish, and many people could begin to articulate the shortcomings of this mental model, I’ve struggled to present a clear and succinct view of what exactly why this model doesn’t work. Although I recently came across a very good model that captures what I tacitly knew already. I hope this is valuable to the rest of you out there trying to make the case for coaching. more »

Thanks to everyone from the Mass Bay PMI Chapter for coming to see me speak about Agile in the Enterprise. It was a great discussion and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I have made my slides available from tonight’s presentation, they can be downloaded here.

Also, several people expressed some interest in local Agile groups so that they could learn more. I would point out three specific ones that have monthly meetings and support vibrant communities of both learners and practitioners:

• Agile Bazaar
• Agile Boston
• Nashua Scrum Club

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend the “Agile Comes to You” event in Waltham. It was great to see so many people interested in learning more about Agile and I had some great conversations. Here is a copy of the slides I used

Discipline in Agile Teams

The other day I had an interesting thought. I’ m not sure what precipitated it exactly, but there were several things that led me to this idea I’ve been mulling in my head. Perhaps it was Alistair Coburn’s keynote at Agile 2009 where he said that Agile as a distinct entity was gone; if it was once an iceberg, it has since melted and is now just part of the ocean. It could have been Jeff Sutherland’s presentation where he points out that 84% of IT organizations are self-reporting to use Scrum. Or perhaps it was simply working with a current client when they were asking for my help to come up with very clear guidelines about the number of acceptance criteria that should be allowed for a single story. Anyway, it struck me: as Scrum grows in popularity, are we institutionalizing it? more »

In November, I spoke at several Agile Journal events in the Northeast about the benefits of using Agile and how they transcend simply “going faster”. I have already posted the presentation, but like most power point slides, it does not stand that well on its own, so I wanted to write up a summary of my thoughts on this topic for the ages, as well as to develop my own thinking. I share these thoughts with you now. more »