October 15, 2011
What a difference a few months can make! After many miles and tedious waits in airports, I have learned something new about how difficult for teams to collaborate and not be co-located. The need for clear communications in distributed teams can only be achieved by having trustworthy, competent and motivated people on the team. if not, you are kidding yourself.
Really?
Really!
June 4, 2011
The state of traditional Project Management, waterfall that is, is in a interesting place these days. I have done some traveling and interviewing of practitioners and I keep hearing similar concerns and questions. A recurring theme is the viability of the adoption of agile principals into the enterprise.
I think that a Project Office that wants to adopt an agile approach to product development is signaling they need a new road map, or at least conceding that they need to grow.
I’m not at all inferring that the traditional approach to project management is in peril but it does seem to be a crossroads.
Since the PMI announced it will offer “pilot” Agile training, I could not help but think that project management as a discipline has reached the fork in the road and is taking a common sense approach and adapting to challenging economic times.
I hope it works out for the PMI. But I worry about the newly minted Agile Certified Practitioners stepping off into their first agile projects. But if innovation was simply a matter of a new process and having the discipline to stick to the plan, product development would be a far better place than we find it right now.
After reviewing a few failed implementations of incremental and iterative product development, I have learned important lessons on how principals, aligned with a flexible approach to collaborating with owners can generate the desired results.
But an honest assessment of the conversion of the top down approach to project management, promoted for years by the PMI, to the current needs of innovative product development in our hyper competitive world, would be a candid admission of failure.
I don’t see that happening anytime soon and I think the “too big to fail” mindset has been institutionalized in modern project management.