PMI Archive

PMI Eating its Own Dogfood

– May 4, 2012Posted in: Agile, Project Management

Current State of the ACP Community Guide I am happy to report that the PMI-ACP Community Guide project is off and running. Each day, I see new content being added. I wonder if this is how Jimmy Wales felt in the early days of Wikipedia. Our first measure of success is to get the content of each page of The Guide as close to the vision of the ACP Steering Committee as quickly as possible. Our second measure of success is to reach a tipping point, whereby the community (not the support team) is maintaining the guide. Remember, future versions of the ACP exam will be based on this Guide.

Community Guide

To reaffirm, there will not be an AgileBOK. The Community Guide of the PMI-ACP (login required) is an initiative of the PMI Agile Community of Practice to provide ongoing support for the PMI-ACP agile certification.

ACP Support Team

Lead by Joseph Flahiff of Whitewater Projects and myself, the ACP Support Team has kickstarted the Community Guide content creation process. We are empowered and 100% self-organized.

The Backlog

In order to deliver something of value to the community, Joseph and I leveraged the wiki within PMI’s website to create a Product Backlog. We wanted transparency and for everyone to know what we are focused on. Every major area of the ACP exam has a page waiting to be edited. If you had a traditional product backlog, the 10 major areas that comprise the Tools & Techniques of the exam could easily be considered Epics. Each page of our wiki could be compared to a User Story. We’re not estimating our work. We’re just doing it.

Iteration 1

We are currently in Iteration 1, which ends on May 10, 2012. Of our 15 member team, we asked volunteers to commit to work on the first 7 pages of the first content area. At the end of each iteration, we can ask members of the ACP steering committee to review what we have done. It’s important that we stay focused, have short feedback loops, and deliver something of value on a regular basis.

Eating the Dogfood

When you think of PMI, you probably think of project plans, schedules, and stuff like that. As a self-organized and empowered team, we decided what is important, to increase the chances of our success. Though there should be a predictable date of completion, based on the currently defined deliverables and length of the iterations, we’re prepared for things to change. We may have to rework some of the pages. We may have some team turnover. Regardless, we can guarantee we will deliver value on a regular basis. We can guarantee there is collaboration with the community.

Joining the Team

If you are interested in creating or maintaining articles for the Community Guide, join our team! If you want to work independently, we welcome your valuable contributions.

Popularity: 1%

Tags: Backlog, Community Guide, Iteration, PMI, PMI-ACP, Team

Free Agile PDU List

Derek Huether

– April 25, 2012Posted in: Agile, Project Management

I was juggling some ideas on how I could list some free “Agile” PMI-ACP or PDUs for people. I think there is a crazy amount of free resources for PMP PDUs. Because of that, I think there needs to be more giving for the Agile contact hours or PDUs. So, without getting too spamming and self-promoting, please feel free to list some places you know of that have free PDUs or contact hours to offer. Make sure you list which PMI PDU category it is applicable to. I will add them as well.

I’m going to be a little self-promoting here. If you would like some Category E (Volunteer Service) PDUs, come help the PMI Agile Community of Practice build and iterate the Community Guide of the ACP. You can claim up to 45 PDUs for your efforts!

Image Source: Pictofigo

Popularity: 1%

Tags: Agile, Contact Hours, Free, PDU, PMI, PMI-ACP

ACP Community Guide vs AgileBOK

Derek Huether

– April 24, 2012Posted in: Agile, Application Development

The Community Guide of the PMI-ACP (login required) is an initiative of the PMI Agile Community of Practice to provide ongoing support for the PMI-ACP agile certification. PMI Today recently highlighted the importance of community volunteers to create the certification, so it only follows that our community be the ones to mature it into the future.

What about the AgileBOK?

There will be no Agile Body of Knowledge (AgileBOK) supported by PMI. PMI does not own, maintain, or support ANY web presence that lives outside of PMI.org. There is not, and never should be an authoritative standard for Agile. Having an AgileBOK would invite all PMI project managers to rigorously follow a standard and never adapt, tailor, or innovate their processes. This counters what we as Agilists stand and strive for.

How can you contribute to the Community Guide?

Team members will work as individual contributors within the Community Guide project. Their involvement may vary based on the nature of the work and their availability. If you are interested in creating or maintaining articles for the ‘Community Guide’, contact the current co-leaders of the ACP Support Team: Joeseph Flahiff and Derek Huether

Who is the Community Guide for?

The Community Guide is intended to be the authoritative source for all the stakeholders in the PMI-ACP ecosphere, including

• A study reference for those pursuing the PMI-ACP credential
• A training reference for REPs and trainers
• A technical reference for exam writers

What does the Community Guide cover?

The Community Guide is a unique community resource, offering you

• Links to relevant PMI documents regarding the certification
• The original intent of the PMI-ACP creators for each topic on the exam
• The current community consensus on how each topic works on “most agile projects, most of the time”

Image Source: Pictofigo

Popularity: 1%

Tags: ACP, Community Guide, PMBOK, PMI, PMI-ACP

How David Bland helped my PMI ACP workshop

Derek Huether

– April 9, 2012Posted in: Agile, Project Management

After each PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (ACP) workshop that I offer, I refine the format to make it better. I learn some new content from the ACP Support team at the PMI Agile Community of Practice and some I learn directly from the students in my class. Originally, my key objective for the class was to provide an introduction to Agile; strictly positioning the class as a knowledge-based learning workshop. The 3-day workshop was a learning experience filled with lecture, group discussions, hands on exercises, and videos. Based on feedback through formal course evaluations and talking with the students, I actually added performance-based learning as an additional key objective. (ie. getting a passing score on a certification exam versus just learning new approaches to deliver value to customers).

It’s been an interesting progression. The name of the workshop started as “Agile Fundamentals: PMI-ACP Prep”. The feedback from the classes was there was not enough exam prep. I didn’t want to create a PMI-ACP Bootcamp but I did want to help my students. I changed the name to PMI Agile Certified Practitioner Workshop and then scattered relevant questions throughout the 3-day course. I also added an ACP Practice exam so people could get a real idea of what the test is like. The last thing I did was give each person attending my class a free Premium account with my tool AgileFlashcards.com.

The results from my latest class were very positive with comments like I liked the fact that this course provided great learning about Agile practices, fundementals and not ONLY ACP prep. Great amount of balance.

I give David Bland some of the credit for getting my class where it is today. I used his Course Canvas to visualize my course and make it better. I’m sure you could use this visual tool to improve all kinds of things. Just remember that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to make improvements. You just need to find the right tool for the job. I found such a tool, with the Course Canvas.

Popularity: 1%

Tags: Course Canvas, David Bland, PMI, PMI-ACP, Training

PMI Agile CoP Retrospective

Derek Huether

– April 3, 2012Posted in: Agile, Project Management

When you think of spending a Saturday afternoon among friends and colleagues, do you picture yourself sitting in front of your computer, collaborating for three hours on a web-based tool and discussing what is working and what could work better? Well, that is exactly what a group of us did. It was time for the quarterly PMI Agile Community of Practice (CoP) retrospective. We couldn’t all be in the same physical location so some of us from the community jumped online and tried to make the world (or at least our CoP) a better place.
When you look at the graphic above (or click on the link to Cacoo), you may be left scratching your head, if you are neither an Agilist nor a member of the PMI Agile CoP. If you are either, I hope you nod in recognizing the mechanism we used to interact and make our Agile Community of Practice a better place for us all to belong.

Community of Practice

You could describe us as a motley crew of discontents and zealots. You could also describe us as a passionate group of Agilists drawn together, with the hope of helping the PMI community discover the value of Agile practices and approaches. We all hold a sense of belonging to our community. We all believe in the altruistic sharing of knowledge, methods, stories, cases, tools, and documents.

Retrospective

Generically speaking, a retrospective meeting is held at the end of a scheduled event or time interval. With the aid of a facilitator (in this case Brian Bozzuto), a team discusses what went well and what could be improved during the next interval or prior to the next scheduled event. The meeting is time-boxed to help ensure it doesn’t just turn into an out-of-control complaining session. When properly facilitated, you come out of the meeting with an actionable list for improvement. Though I always recommend doing retrospectives in person, actually having the retrospective takes priority. Do it wherever you can however you can. Successful teams need to take the time to have retrospectives if they have any chance of improving what they do.

PMI Agile CoP Quarterly Retrospective

The leadership of this community recognizes that as our community grows, some things will work and some challenges will need to be overcome (zoom into the graphic to see what we thought). One thing is for certain: with almost 14,000 members, our PMI community has a lot to offer both members and non-members. Every minute of that Saturday afternoon was well spent. I hope this post and the link to the Cacoo graphic provides some transparency into what we’ve been doing the last three months.

Interested in joining our community or becoming a volunteer? We’d love to have you!

Source: This post was originally written and published by me on the PMI Agile Community of Practice blog

Popularity: 1%

Tags: Agile, CoP, PMI, retrospective