Agile and Project Management Talks at SXSW 2012

Last year I attended SXSW for the first time. While I had intended to spend my days basking in the onslaught of music and film that it is known for, what I actually spent my time doing was focusing mostly on the talks that centered on Agile and Project Management. Each of the presentations on PM and Agile were very well attended. In some cases there was a line waiting to get in, so there is a definite hunger for information at the event. Unfortunately, with the exception of one talk (given by Brett Harned and Pamela Villacorta) the content presented in most of the PM and Agile talks was disappointing.

SXSW 2012 is right around the corner and they’ve opened the area where people can vote on proposed topics. If you’ve got a few minutes, follow the links below to become an SXSW 2012 Panel Picker, search for Agile and PM presentations vote Thumbs Up for the ones you think look interesting.  This Spring, there will be another crowd of PMs in Austin who are interested in learning about project management and how to do it better.  Help make sure the talks they get to choose from are going to help them raise their game. Who knows… you may end up working with some of them someday. Continue reading

Letting go of the Concrete Life Raft

By Dave Prior for Scrumalliance.org

On my first day of work on a job where my very official job title was listed as “Project Manager”, a stressed out, old, bearded guy took me and the other newly minted PM into a room to teach us how to do our job. The first thing he said was, “When I am done with you, everything you do will be a project. You’ll be unable to look at the world any other way.” Truer words were never spoken. Looking at the world as a series of smaller tasks, with dependencies, a baseline, and a critical path invaded every corner of my brain. I stopped brushing my teeth and started executing a series of steps, which had dental hygiene as a measure of success. A few years later, after months of study, I passed the PMP exam and began trying to impose my “enlightened” approach on the rest of the world with results that were occasionally successful, but mostly, not so much. Read more bei Scrumalliance.

Agile 2010 Presentation Recap and Retrospective

Thushara Wijewardena and I have had a great response to our Agile 2010
presentation, “Why You Suck at Offshoring, Even with Agile“. In an effort to respond to some of the requests we have received, we put together a video recap of our presentation along with a retrospective. The video is broken up into two segments because of the size. Please let us know what you think. Continue reading