It's been Day 1 of #PMIcon17 and I think most of us now have sore throats from speaking so much! It's been a fabulous day of learning about our peers and helping with their queries. A few of my highlights from today:

• Helping Anne who was struggling with knowing the way to go with her career progression and what was the best next step to make
• Coaching Chris in understanding the agile methodology and what agile is and isn't
• Chatting to Brian regarding cultural issues and the different types of cultures in his team

The most exciting thing about today was seeing how much passion my peers have in their careers and how much they are looking to learn over the next two days of conference.

If you can't secure a 1-1 slot, please feel free to come by the booth as there are normally a group of us sitting around, ready to chat!

So we are all here at #PMICon17!

Are you ready to learn about Agile?

If so, here's a tour guide throughout the conference on sessions that may be of interest to you (besides coming and talking to me one-on-one during the Ask the Experts sessions).

Let's start at the top with Sir Tim Berners Lee on The Future of Tech.  Agile approaches are all about helping us understand solving complex adaptive problems. Sir Tim will set the stage on that one as he talks about The Internet of Things, Future of Artificial Intelligence, The Next Web Paradigm Shift, The Power of Data, Impact of Security and Privacy on the Web and Business, and into the real transformative impact these technologies are having and will have in the years ahead.

Here is a list of sessions to continue your journey - I show the session ID and title. I chose them on the basis of not pushing a proprietary tool or method, and of not being as close to pure agile topics as possible. I start all of my classes on agility with a slide about the fact we sometimes need to unlearn old things in order to learn new ones properly. This means my list does not contain any waterfall-agile hybrid sessions. I like to keep it clean!

1. Saturday 337 W183A - Red Pill/Blue Pill: Design Thinking applied to Project Management
2. Saturday 340 W185a - Balanced Project Management with Kanban: Maximum Control, Higher Productivity, Less Stress
3. Saturday 358 W183a and Sunday 403-EXH - Hands-on Lab: Deep Dive into the Agile Practice Guide
4. Saturday 362 W175 - Evolving Agile Leadership at Riot Games: A story of Challenging Convention
5. Sunday 413 W175 – Winning! Using Improv Games to improve facilitation with teams
6. Sunday 417-EXH – Planning and Delivering Value with an Agile PPMO
7. Saturday 420 W183b – Six Agile Experts walk into a bar…Hours later what emerges?
8. Sunday 426 W175 – How to use Agile Program/Portfolio Tools to Increase Project Health
9. Monday 507 W183a – I see what you are saying: How to communicate better Visually
10. Monday 510 W176 – Agile and Design Thinking, the perfect pairing for a successful project
11. Monday 513-EXH – Hands-on Lab: Shaping Agile Transformation
12. Monday 522 183c – Is the future of Project Management #NoProjects?
13. Monday 527-EXH – Hands-on Lab: Writing Business Objectives and Quantifying Future Value

If you’d like to talk strategic intent, adaptive strategy, back-casting over forecasting, outcomes over outputs, any of the agilities, or pretty much anything you think I may be able to help you with in making a difference in your world, here is my availability during the conference:

• Saturday the 28th from 1:30 to 4:30 - FULL
• Sunday the 29th from 3:00 to 5:00
• Monday the 30th from 9:00 to 10:50

You can sign up here

You can also connect with me at:

•     https://twitter.com/cooperlk99
•     https://www.linkedin.com/in/lawrencekcooper
•     www.TheAgilitySeries.com

Tomorrow is the day! It's the start of the PMI Global Conference and the Ask The Experts team are ready and waiting to help you with your project management queries.

We're all slowly arriving in Chicago (which by the way is a bit chilly so i'd recommend bringing a coat, gloves and scarf!) and it's really exciting to see all of the displays being erected and attendees starting to arrive. 

What can you look forward to at the "Ask the Experts" stand? 

Knowledge

Primarily, the main thing to look at is our knowledge! PMI have assembled a great team of experts with knowledge covering all the major aspects of Project Management.

Experience

I dare not try to calculate the number of years experience that the entire group has and with this experience comes wisdom and support for any issues that you might be having

Expertise

We're all experts in our field and we've been around the block when it comes to projects. 

Who to see?

Take a look here and see all of the experts that will be on offer this weekend and come and make a booking

What about me?

I'm available to chat about anything... but i'm really interested in: agile practices, talent management, virtual teams, communication, professional development, Next-gen project management

This is a backward blog posting!

This will be my final post before leaving for Chicago tomorrow morning.  So, I wanted to do this one more like the way I think about things – BACKWARDS.  Instead of telling what areas I can help with, I thought I’d ramble about what areas I like to talk about!  I guarantee it would be an entertaining discussion.  Just make select an open appointment here:  then wander over, say hello and lets just talk about one of MY favorite things.

1.  Project failure.   I know more than I ever wanted to know about this.  There was a group of us that Left NASA at the same time and moved to Orlando to start a company dedicated to turning around troubled projects, programs and operations.  When we started, we thought we’d seen just about all the problems that project can get into.  WRONG.  For the next 5 or 6 years we only worked on turning around projects that were at least 100% over budget, perhaps 3 or 4 years late, had irate customers… or simply failed to deliver anything of value. 

It’s not easy to judge project failure!  EVA won’t do it.  It’s a very subjective thing.  “Could anyone have done better in the same situation?” is a basic test, but there are many more. 

So, we fired, hired, replaced, improved… bought contracts, had contracts “novated” to us, and were very successful ending up with a stand-along building and 70 employees.  There’s a lot of trouble out there!   There were project mistakes made that I didn’t think cold be made.   We worked on Casino projects, entertainment projects, airline projects, and many other types.  

Our group learned a lot!  I love to talk about a failed project and how it can be recovered.  Number 1: be ready for stress.  We called being personally ready “the full wax job.”  Exercise, diet, mental toughness, how you dress…  no kidding!  But you need to be prepared.

2.  Working with a team that has widely diverse skills.  If the team gets diverse enough, sometimes you can’t understand what the other people are saying.  I’ve managed teams with theoretical physicists, mathematicians, brilliant engineers and more – of course, they were totally convinced they were ALL CORRECT, don’t even think about doubting their work.  This was great fun.  I loved it and learned a whale of a lot about things they didn’t teach me (a humble engineer) in school.

3. Project risk.  How to think about it, how to predict it, how to anticipate it, how to communicate it, how to budget for it, how to look for the often-neglected positive risk.  It’s CRITCAL that project managers and their teams master this skill.   I’ve had friends die a horrible death  because we (in a larger sense) didn’t manage risk well.

4.  Have the courage of your convictions.  Tell people what you believe, tell the bosses what your project team believes.  Don’t fall into the trap of “drinking your own bath water” or the “echo chamber.” 

Well, I feel better!   Wander over and chat with me!

-- Dave Maynard

GOING TO THE 2017 PMI GLOBAL CONFERENCE IN CHICAGO?  

Don’t forget about ASK THE EXPERTS!

Stop by and talk to Dave Maynard or one of the other experts.  There’s more information about it at https://tinyurl.com/y7ff8f3g

On Monday through Wednesday of this week I was teaching our PMI-ACP course in Toronto. Over the three days, as we walked among the different frameworks, methods and practices that are part of the course, a common theme started to emerge among the participants.

While the students could see the clear benefits of each framework, method or practice, they also began to recognize the challenges they faced in being successful at applying them in their organizations; Organizations that still operate under traditional management approaches.

Some of the more obvious challenge areas noted included:

• Finance – budgeting processes would still be based on the big upfront estimates that cover multiple planning years.
  • Traditional cost accounting operates over long time horizons.  
  • The budgeting process focuses on controlling variances over focusing on what may be the right thing to do  
  • Operating and capital expenses are segregated; Often  times this I fairly arbitrary to order to meet prescribed percentages of what should be in each
  • Audit is focused on looking for the “smoking gun” rather than working with teams to avoid the smoking gun in the first place
• Procurement – the current RFP processes rely on being prescriptive and transferring most of the risk to the vendors
  • Vendors bid to win and then use the Change Request process which often drives final costs to be two-to-three times the original bid price
• HR – existing HR policies are primarily based on hiring to skill rather than hiring to behaviour and compensation policies are reward individual rather than team achievement
  • People are called  resources, assets and capital as if they are interchangeable like furniture and computers
  • Competition is valued over contribution to value creation
• Executive level – see this “agile thing” as just an IT team level thing that will somehow increase the productivity of these groups but has no bearing on how their level of the organization

It is interesting to me that organizations are willing to invest in having their people learn about more agile ways of thinking and working, while they somehow believe that outside of these teams (usually within IT), that it’s OK to keep doing what they’ve always done.

The people who show up for these classes do want to do things differently because they genuinely want to make a difference. They recognize the folly of continuing to use outmoded ways of thinking that rely on prescription in an increasingly chaotic and complex world.

Yet here they are. In a class that will validate what they already have come to know about why things don’t work. Where they will learn some new ways of thinking and some new ways of working that offer the possibility of handling the complexity and chaos they know their organizations face.  

And now they have to go back to organizations that, outside of the teams that these people belong to, want to keep doing what they have always done.

The IT industry and those in the agile space have tended to focus on the team-level with their educational thrusts. There is nothing wrong with that. However, it does leave the part of  every organization that can actually make the real difference in meeting the complexity and chaos challenges to pretend that agile is a IT-team thingy. It isn’t. It’s an everyone in the organizational thingy – and that starts at the top.

Are you a leader in an organization where your teams are learning about and/or starting to use agile approaches? Do you  recognize the crucial role you will play in how successful or not these teams will be? Do you realize that in order for them to make a difference, that you will also need to make a difference by eliminating challenges such as those above?

In our course on Adaptive Leadership we refer to that part of leadership your need to be the CSR (Chief S**t Remover). Whatever impedes your teams' ability to help you achieve organizational and business agility needs to be removed. As a leader are you up to being a CSR?

If you’d like to talk strategic intent, adaptive strategy, back-casting over forecasting, outcomes over outputs, any of the agilities, or pretty much anything you think I may be able to help you with in making a difference in your world, here is my availability during the conference:

• Saturday the 28th from 1:30 to 4:30
• Sunday the 29th from 3:00 to 5:00
• Monday the 30th from 9:00 to 12:00

You can also connect with me at:

•     https://twitter.com/cooperlk99
•     https://www.linkedin.com/in/lawrencekcooper
•     www.TheAgilitySeries.com