Retrospective on 2012 and look into 2013

 

It’s that time of year again where we exit the current year and enter the new.  As is fashionable for a blog on Agile, I’d like to do an end of year retrospective.  First and foremost, I’d like mention that I have blogged here for my first full year and appreciate the opportunity to write about project management “Agility and Project Leadership” as well as being thankful for all the feedback and readership from this excellent PM portal site.

Some of the most popular topics have been around the migration of Agile outside of software development, and for me the most visible example was the build out of the Wikispeed race car using Agile practices, methods and principles from top to bottom.  I first wrote about it in a blog as well as an in depth article.  Other interesting and popular topics included the recent posting on the increasing popularity as well as the increasing commercialization (or commodification) of Scrum.  Like it or not, Scrum’s explosive growth as well as global popularity and adoption has made Agile a household name in the project management field.  PMI is now competing with their own Agile certification.

Unless you lived under a rock, Agile is gaining serious traction and one only has to view the most recent and just released PMBOK v5.0 to see that there is much more Agile-isms incorporated in this version than last.  What this indicates is that there will be more desire and need to create a bridge for those who are still practicing traditional project management to integrate more Agile with it.  In many instances it will not be by choice and will cut across much more diverse industries than just software development.  It will take more skill, knowledge and know how to bridge this gap and for 2013 my goal with this blog and future articles is to write about and hopefully provide guidance on this.  For I am actively working in an environment where this bridge needs to occur, so I am writing from the perspective of an actual practitioner in the field so you’ll know it’s for real.

With that I look forward to future conversations with all you highly skilled and professional Agile project professionals and leaders and may 2013 be even more fruitful than 2012!

Happy new years!