January 2007 – Leading Answers

January 28, 2007October 3, 2026Agile Project Management, Leadership, Teams

Agile Leadership Pattern: Project Obituary Exercise

Try this exercise with your team to identify, overcome, and avoid potential project “gottchas”. Get the team to write a project obituary; ask them to imagine the project is nearly over and has failed; their job for the next 45 minutes is to describe all the things that went wrong contributing to its eventual demise. Often people who are difficult to engage in regular vision exercises relish the opportunity to list all the things that could go wrong. Perhaps given a slightly pessimistic slant on life, they can generate an exhaustive list of possible, albeit gloomy, outcomes for the project. These might include communication failures that lead to mismatched expectations, vendor delays, team morale issues, etc, anything that could negatively […]

January 28, 2007Agile Project Management, Events, Leadership, Teams

Update on PMI Dinner Talk ‘Agile Project Leadership”

My last two posts outlined a talk I was preparing for the Calgary PMI chapter. The presentation went well, the event was full at 125 people and the audience was very receptive to the message. This was pretty much expected, as nothing was meant to be confrontational. I positioned leadership as the human-centric extension to management that I believe it is. We had some good questions after the talk and I was invited back by the organizers to present at their PMI Conference in November which was a nice endorsement. (I enjoyed the event, but need to get faster at creating these presentations. I use a lot of graphics and team-room photographs and these currently take me much too long […]

January 24, 2007October 3, 2026Agile Project Management, Events, Leadership, Teams

An introduction to Agile Project Leadership – Part 2

In Part 1 I explored the humanistic side of leadership and two leadership practices:1. Modeling desired behaviour2. Creating and communicating a vision In this post I will explain three more practices:3. Enable others to act4. Willingness to challenge the status quo 5. Encouraging each other And wrap up discussion of the presentation “Agile Project Leadership” I will be delivering tomorrow evening. 3) Enable others to act – We need to foster collaboration by building trust and strengthen others by sharing power. When we have a trusting work place people can be more productive since people need not fear reprisal or ridicule if they make a mistake. I visualize it like this, if you need one hand to cover your rear […]

January 23, 2007October 3, 2026Agile Project Management, Events, Leadership, Teams

An introduction to Agile Project Leadership – Part 1

On Thursday 25th I will be presenting on “Agile Project Leadership” at the PMI Southern Alberta Chapter. These sessions normally attract a diverse group of project managers from a variety of industries. I am looking forward to the opportunity to spread the word about agile leadership and plug our local Calgary APLN chapter. Not everyone will be familiar with agile methods so I will quickly run through the W5 (what, why, when, who, where) of agile and then hopefully spend the bulk of my time on the leadership portion of the talk. On trying to create a 5 slide overview of Agile, I stumbled across a nice value proposition summary on the VersionOne web site. I have seen all the […]

January 18, 2007Agile Project Management, Leadership

Agile Leadership Domain

The Venn diagram shown here (click on it for a larger view)was created to help explain the context of agile project leadership (shown in orange). It is intended to illustrate the inclusion of elements from the Agile Methods, Leadership Theory and Traditional Project Management domains. The dots within the regions indicate a non-exhaustive list of example topics that fall in that realm. For instance Agile Methods often contain guidance for testing techniques that fall outside the everyday province of agile leadership, while servant leadership is common to Agile leadership and regular leadership theory. The model is not ideal, you could consider visioning or risk management as part of agile methods and while the activities of agile teams certainly create a […]

January 11, 2007Agile Project Management, Events, Leadership

The Future of Agile

What should the Agile Alliance be focussing on? What can the APLN do to change how projects are managed? I will be attending the Agile Alliance directors planning meeting in Portland, Oregon at the end of January and the Agile Project Leadership Network directors meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah in February to discuss these topics and welcome ideas and suggestions from readers, The Agile Alliance has a large (and growing) membership of supporters and with proceeds raised from events like the Agile 2006 conference in Minneapolis, memberships, and corporate sponsorship is able to fund research into Agile methods and other ventures. What areas of agile research are most deserving: distributed team techniques, new testing techniques, or the wider use […]

January 11, 2007Agile Project Management, Events, Leadership

Next Calgary APLN Meeting

The next Calgary Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) meeting will be on Monday January 15th when I will be talking about “Agile Suitability Filters”. Here are the details: Event: Calgary APLN: “Agile Suitability Filters”Presenter: Mike Griffiths, Quadrus Development Inc.Date: Monday January 15, 2007Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM (registration will commence at 11:30 AM) Light beverages to be providedLocation: 5th Avenue Place – Conference Room […]

January 6, 2007Agile Project Management, Leadership

The Certification Debate

The pro’s and con’s of certification in Agile Leadership are being discussed on a few Yahoo groups at the moment. Some people believe any kind of certification is inherently evil and I can appreciate this point of view, but the idealist in me wonders if it can be done right? I am involved in an APLN sub-group to create a proposal for an accreditation scheme. I thought long and hard before joining the group, but it became apparent that other groups and training companies were discussing the creation of alternative schemes and so my feelings were that if it was going to happen anyway, then I would like the chance to steer it towards a decent goal. The current situationIt […]