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Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Why You Suck At Offshoring, Even With Agile (Part 2 of 2) is a post from: Project Shrink.

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Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Why You Suck At Offshoring, Even With Agile (Part 1 of 2) is a post from: Project Shrink.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Potion – Agility And Programs With Johanna Rothman is a post from: Project Shrink.

Yesterday Derek Huether explained in a great post how he relates agile approaches in terms of the PMBOK to get acceptance from stakeholders:

“I would propose that you make sure you can communicate with stakeholders in a language they understand. If you start using terms like Sprint, ScrumMaster, and Burndowns, when they understand contract periods of performance, project managers, and EVM reports, you may lose that essential stakeholder buy-in.”

I agree. By changing your language you can also improve the relation with a person. By talking “the same” you appear more similar, and the more similar you are perceived, the more attracted you are to your conversation partner. It doesn’t matter if you have a job interview, talking to a project sponsor or trying to get a date. Like attract likes and language is a huge influencer in that process.

But!

If you are using Scrum, you are using Scrum. There is amazing power in using a method properly. Everyone knows what to expect. All are using the same rules of engagement, you create alignment. If you use a “standard” rule set by it’s name, like Scrum, XP, Prince2, you really have to use the entire set that is covered by the label. PINO, as in Prince In Name Only, or SINO, Scrum In Name Only, is worst case. People will assume they are working according to a certain set of rules, when in reality they are not. Total misalignment.

If you are using the labels PMBOK for sponsors and Scrum for team members, you create a big mess.

So!

So?

I know. It’s somewhere in between. It depends.

But how far is somewhere?

BTW If you are interested in the question: “How do you convince an organization to use Scrum or another agile practice and really adopt it?” I recommend this post.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Schizophrenic Use Of Methods is a post from: Project Shrink.

The road to a successful project is littered with over-promised, over-time, over-budget, and under-delivered products. We have all been on these projects, and it is because of them that all of us are seeking new methods and processes that make us stand out as project management professionals.

But, there is a shift happening, and we have to be ready for it. As the tools to develop products advance, the cost of designing and writing code continues to fall. New engineering processes have come along, like Xtreme, Pair, Iterative, Agile and SCRUM, which give us new ways of creating project structures. New interaction patterns have been created under the classifications of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, the social web or the semantic web, that equip us with a host of definitive user expectations to design against. All of these things make it easier to create products at faster rates and higher levels of quality.

If this is the case, why do projects continue to fail? Why do they – without an end in sight – continue to suck up time, money and resources? And why, when they are complete, only deliver a sliver of additional value – or worse, none at all? Because despite modern shifts in technology, design and process, we continue to be project managers, when we really should become product managers.

The main difference between a project manager and a product manager is empathy. In the face of customer requirements, it’s time for us to learn a new level of humility. It’s no longer about getting the train to run on time. Rather, it’s about ensuring that the journey to value for both the customer and the participants of the product is fulfilling. Only through complete empathy with our customers can we accomplish this.

Robert Scoble recently gave a talk at the Technonomy conference in Tel Aviv, Israel, called “Are YOU from the future?” He lists out a variety of popular products (Gmail, Facebook, Photo sharing applications, etc.) and reminds us that these actions – while everyday to us – aren’t as common to others. In fact, most people will never use many of these products or services.

Some examples that mean you are from the future include:

• You’ve written some filters on Gmail to filter your emails.
• You’ve shared something that once used to be private.
• You watch TV online.
• You use Salesforce Chatter, SocialText, Jive, SocialCast, Box.net or Yammer at work with your coworkers.
• You know the difference between uploading a photo to Flickr, SmugMug, Picasa, or Facebook, and why you would use one versus another.

What Robert Scoble is illustrating is the massive disconnect between all the different products, the differentiating features of these products, their value propositions, and the average person on the web.

Think about the last project you worked on and all the features in there. How many of those features were made for someone from the future? How many of those features were responsible for your project going over-budget or missing the deadline?

As product managers, it is our job to build a product for people. As such, we need to take massive steps to start better understanding the people we are building for and scope our projects ONLY to test those assumptions. This isn’t a new idea; it is the cornerstone of customer development and the pursuit of product/market fit. Both of those concepts start to actually matter when you move from being a project manager to becoming a product manager.

Many project managers really don’t care if the end product is successful, and many times a project manager doesn’t really care if the product is useful. They are given a spec and are told when the product is needed by. Project managers maximize efficiency and control for change.

But it’s time to stop thinking like this. Instead, let’s treat every project like a start-up. Ask yourself who you are building this for. What does success look like? What are your assumptions? How do you test these assumptions and learn if you’re attracting the target group of customers to your product? From large enterprises to small start-ups, empathizing with your customers begins with building something they will actually use.

Cultivating empathy isn’t easy, but there are some useful steps to do so:

1. Learn to embed yourself in the culture of your customers. Who are they? What do they want? What part of you is also a part of them?
2. Learn that it is never the customers fault if they don’t know how to use your product. Don’t get caught up in the self-congratulations of building something to spec. Instead, get more caught up in building it to the specifications needed for success.
3. Get comfortable with the idea that all you have are guesses. Even the best design from the best designer is a guess until someone uses it. Your best shot is to get it up quickly, validate it with real customers, learn, and iterate.
4. Don’t forget to cultivate empathy for the other members of your team. They face their own challenges balancing expectations, velocity, and their own measures of success. It helps as a product manager to have as much of a sense of engineering and design as possible. Part of your life-long learning as a product manager should be an intimate knowledge of both the tools and the people needed to create success.

A part of me hopes that over time, the “Project Manager” title will fall away. Given the rapid pace of change in technology, we are quickly leaving the realm of the definitive project and are now entering the continuum of the product. We’re going to need a new generation of individuals who are less enchanted with long timelines, large budgets and deadlines, and, instead, are more prepared to manage the unknowns of a customer-driven process.

###

Trapper Markelz (@trappermarkelz) has over 10 years of direct experience building consumer-facing web products that focus on community and conversation. Prior to MeYou Health, Trapper was at GamerDNA, a digital gaming media company committed to developing customer value through the real-time observation and understanding of gamer behavior. Trapper also co-founded 360voice.com, an online Xbox gaming community, and pioneered auto-blogging technology to drive new ways of interacting around games using data. He also worked in Chicago, IL for Spencer Stuart and Associates, pioneering agile development strategies and adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. He attended the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he graduated in 1999 with a degree in Information Technology, and now lives in Arlington, MA, with his wife Maureen and two daughters, Lucy and Hannah.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - The Difference between Project Management and Product Management is a post from: Project Shrink.

That is way I am very excited about the recently founded PMI Agile Community of Practice. It’s one of the latest communities of the Project Management Institute, the largest Project Management organization with a strong “plan-driven” tradition. The new community aims to equip PMI Members with Agile skills and knowledge.

In this episode of The Project Shrink Podcast I am talking to Jesse Fewell, one of the people involved in starting the community.

We discuss what PMPs can learn from agilist and vice versa; and what people can expect from the new community.

Episode on Youtube: The PMI Agile Community of Practice

For more information you can check out their public workspace or, if you are a PMI member, the virtual community space.

For those of you visiting Agile 2009 in Chicago this month, the PMI Agile Community will be there promoting their launch.

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Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - The PMI Agile Community of Practice is a post from: Project Shrink.

I asked this question to three Project Managers experienced with agile practices and traditional approaches.

Jesse Fewell, JesseFewell.com

“PMI CEO Greg Balestrero has been talking a lot lately about moving the Project Management field away from performance-to-plan and toward value-delivery. Often the key barriers are stereotypes about Agile (“renegades who do what they want”) and Lean (“doing the same amount of work with fewer resources”).

In the end, every organization wants to “deliver value early and deliver value often”, and that is what Agile is all about. As a result, you find many organizations quickly sign on to experiment with Agile.

The difficulty comes when Agile starts to create transparency and accountability. Most organizations are not used to that, and will go through many “growing pains” that will either slow down or completely stop an Agile adoption effort. For example, the modern Project Manager is called upon to fill many roles at once, which masks a lot of confused responsibilities in the organization.

When the Project Manager starts pushing more decisions onto the sponsor, and more accountability onto the project team, things can get awkward and frustrating. But you have to go through that discomfort in order to grow. “No pain, no gain”.

Convincing organizations to “Go Agile” is not so hard. The greatest difficulty is convincing organizations to “stay Agile.”

Craig Brown, BetterProjects.net

“Project managers can’t convince an organization or senior management to adopt Scrum.

The owners of the project have to want to change. Project managers can simply provide Scrum as an option. Someone needs to have an urgent and important problem that they both see intellectually and feel emotionally.

IT managers and project managers are much more likely to feel the pain and seek help via agile methods than operations project managers or non-IT executives. The IT folk are at the end of the delivery chain and so when things go wrong at any stage of a project it is usually discovered at the IT delivery end.

If you are dealing with IT manager only, you’ll find kindred spirits who want to throw off the shackles of dysfunctional process.

If on the other hand you are dealing with people who don’t usually work on projects, or people who only deal with the front end of projects (initiation, requirement specification, and maybe design) then you’ll have a harder time convincing them of the need for change. They aren’t feeling the pain.

Recently I read a paper by a project manager who implemented scrum at a Queensland government department. It is here (PDF); (discovered here).

You’d think senior execs would want a change, but their business isn’t IT and they have process experts and auditors who are used to working a particular way. Convincing them to change is possible, but you have to be the right person with the right levels of trust and so on.”

Bob Tarne, Zen-Pm.blogspot.com

“I think each organization is different and therefore there could be different reasons for why organizations should adopt Scrum/agile. In the situations I’ve been in the biggest benefit for adopting agile is to increase the speed of delivery. I’ve worked with organizations that get to caught up in analysis/design.

They try to get answers that aren’t available yet and build the system around that, finding that they need to go back and make changes, which slows things down. Since change is inevitable, you need to spend less time trying to lock down the design up front and build your process to quickly identify and accept the changes.”

Image by Army.mil.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - How To Convince An Organization To Go Agile? is a post from: Project Shrink.

Scuze me? I am Dutch. Does that count?

Of course I know about agile approaches. Yes, I know Scrum.

Yes, I know the devastating effects a single minded, too narrow focused, command-and-control fanatic can have on the workplace.

But I also know that you can create a balance between plan-driven and agile approaches.

Image by SuperFantastic.

I also know that humans need to categorize everything just to make sense of the world.

When combining the two statements, it will become obvious that “plan-driven” and “agile” are also some arbitrary concepts created by humans to support the limited mind. There is no natural law defining “agile”, there is no eternal balance putting each of them on the extremes of some kind of scale.

It is just us, making up a context we can understand. You can call it whatever you want. And you can put in anything you like. Or out, if you want.

Brian Marick believes Agile is being dumbed down. So he created Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism. Just to be sure no one would take that name and create it into something else.

Paul Ritchie mentions the emergence of “Sim”: “… because this piece is in Forbes, I’ll bet that smart c-level folks will soon be asking their PMOs about whether they are incorporating this approach into their methodologies.”

People!

There is just a problem that needs to be taken care of. There is just a team that must be managed. Just observe the situation and look for the cause. Don’t get caught up in “finding the right method”.

Find the problem. Find the solution.

We don’t need sexy flexi Agilist. We don’t need plan-driven commanders.

We need people that can use any technique, any mindset, any approach at the right time.

We need: Freestylers!

You need to be Freestyling.

We need our own song!

Agile. Plan-driven. Waterfall. Freestyling.

I did it again, didn’t I?

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Freestyling: Beating Agile, Lean And Plan-driven Hands Down is a post from: Project Shrink.

Love it!

Met some great people like Dave Prior, the author of the Drunken PM blog and the ITT SIG Podcast, and a big agile fan. Great day for him. On this first day of the conference a lot of attention went to Agile practices.

You can watch this short episode of The Project Shrink on YouTube or below.

You should also check out the interview Dave did this weekend about PMI creating virtual communities.

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Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - First Day At PMI EMEA Congress With Dave Prior is a post from: Project Shrink.

We are focusing on the agreement with the client. As David explains, this approach is actually an explicit decision about which party will take what risk for what price. For the customer the fixed price offers a safety net, the maximum amount that they have to pay. In the agreement they leave more than normal room for changes which are done in an agile fashion.

• Why would customers want to go for this type of arrangement?
• How do you explain the rules of this new game?

Questions I will be addressing in the flowing interview with David Webb.

You can view the video below… or follow this link to Viddler.com.

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Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Executives, Fixed Price And Agility is a post from: Project Shrink.