Agile Is Alive and Well in Portland, Oregon!
Welcome to the newsletter Agile column! This will be a monthly forum to cover agile topics relevant to our Chapter. I’m Jean Richardson, and I’ll be organizing the content for the column with support from the newsletter staff. My role is the Chapter Engagement Representative (CER) for the global PMI Agile Community of Practice. This month I’m covering the agile activity we’ve had over the past year. But first, let me tell you a little about how the CER role came about.
In 2012, a conversation was initiated with the Portland PMI Chapter leadership, regarding building a stronger connection between our Chapter and the global PMI Agile Community of Practice (CoP). With the support and assistance of Ainsley Nies, who launched the CER role for the global Agile CoP, the Chapter Engagement Representative role was established late in the fall of 2012. In January I met with then President Elect, Diane Brady, and VP of Professional Development, Trish Kelley, to formalize the following program of agile-related educational activities for the Chapter to pursue in the current year. As CER, I committed to facilitating a number of activities in the Chapter, in collaboration with the appropriate Chapter leaders. Here is a status on what we accomplished:
- Provide articles for the Chapter newsletter on as much as a monthly basis. This has evolved into, now, a regular column on agile, and, in cooperation with Jim Ure, Assistant Newsletter Director, I am recruiting other local agilists to contribute, as well.
- Create a monthly dinner meeting program. I recruited a panel of five local, regionally, and internationally well-known agilists (Lonnie Weaver Johnson, Diana Larsen, Adam Light, Ward Cunningham, and Joseph Flahiff) to speak on the topic “Agile-Broadly” at our June 2013 meeting. A total of 139 people attended this meeting, and the questions from the floor for the panel were quite interesting, showing a high level of engagement in the topic.
- Create a monthly educational meeting program. In June 2013, the dinner meeting panelists also provided a pre-function educational workshop, “Agile in Portland: A Lean Coffee Experience,” which both discussed agile in Portland and provided the attendees with an agile cultural experience by using the Lean Coffee model.
- Coordinate agile-related workshops. In June 2013, “Agile Retrospectives” was offered by Diana Larsen with 13 attending and “Being Agile in a Waterfall World,” was offered by Joseph Flahiff, with 40 attending. Appetite remains for additional workshops on agile and related topics.
- Provide roundtable outreach. I attended, on a monthly basis, as many of the seven roundtables distributed around the metro area as I possibly could. I got to each roundtable at least twice and some much more often than that. Since each roundtable has its own personality, this was quite the most adventurous portion of my activities in the last year. My charter was to help roundtable attendees understand the range of educational opportunities available locally and through the national PMI Agile CoP web site . The web site can help them to understand what “Agile” is, as well as in their possible preparation for the PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner exam. I often found myself in spirited conversations with roundtable attendees. I also supported the Northwest Roundtable in finding a series of speakers on agile topics, and was asked to give a formal presentation to the roundtable on the topic of “When Will the Pendulum Swing Back?” which I did in November 2013.
- Present an agile-related topic at the annual conference. My topic at the conference was “An Agile Leadership Model for Leading Agile Teams.” The room was truly standing room only and it generated a two-hour discussion at the end of the conference with a local project management luminary (he’ll love that appellation). We closed the place down, and our ensuing conversations have generated a co-presentation that will be offered to the membership later this program year.
- Be the agile outreach “safe person” for agile-interested PMI meeting attendees. I also find myself going to lunch or coffee with folks I meet at the PMI meetings who want a little more information about Agile. I am active in the local AgilePDX user group, and serve as a member of the coordinating committee and as the facilitator of the monthly AgilePDX Downtown Pub Lunch. I have recently become a volunteer with Agile Open Northwest, and provide a bridging function between the communities. This is welcomed by both organizations.
As a CER, as you can see from the list of activities above, I am dependent on the range and quality of offerings provided through the national PMI organization. I attend as many of these events as I can, and do what I can to raise the profile and awareness of the Agile CoP in the local Chapter. In my view, there continues to be a need for high quality agile webinars offered through the Agile CoP; one of the limiting factors appears to be the technology that is used. Please add your voice to mine if you engage in that CoP nationally, and shout out for such free webinars to be available for members.
There’s a lot going on in Portland in relation to agile, as there is around the world. Many of our largest organizations, including city, county and state government, are attempting agile adoptions and transformations at various scales. My own client list includes local organizations that range from one-team to 35-team agile adoptions. We’d like to include profiles of some of local agile-aspiring organizations in future newsletters. If you would like to participate, please let us know!
The CER role here may be key to helping traditional project managers turn their attention to agile in a more friendly way. There is a perception in some quarters that traditional and agile practices must be pitted against each other and cannot co-exist in a given organization. I’m not sure all experienced agilists would agree with that. The PMI-ACP certification seems to be poised to push that conversation to a new level, to help project managers understand the differences—and, hopefully, the similarities between agile and traditional project management. This topic may well become a stronger theme in discussions in the Portland Chapter in 2014.
New for 2014, is the local PMI Chapter Agile Roundtable that launched on January 8. In my next column, I’ll be reporting on that launch event as well as other upcoming agile-related activities in and around Portland and the region. This includes Agile Open Northwest 2014, an annual self-organizing conference being held this year February 5-7 in Seattle. I’m registered, are you?
About the Author
Jean Richardson is the Agile Community of Practice Chapter Engagement Representative for the Portland, Oregon chapter of PMI. She is also an agile coach and project management professional with more than 20 years’ experience with clients in the Portland metro area. Her initial agile training, the Certified Scrum Master (CSM) credential, was provided by Ken Schwaber, one of the two developers of the Scrum framework. You can read her blog on leadership, agile, and project management at http://azuregate.net/blog-archive/ and link with her at http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=7674981&trk=tab_pro. You can correspond with her at jean@azuregate.net.