Month: October 2008

Agile Project Management, Events, Leadership

PMI Opening the Doors to Agile

“To deal with complex projects there is an increased need for agile and flexible project management… In future, ‘people’ and leadership skills will be viewed as more important than technical skills.” Statements like these hardly seem surprising to regular readers here. This is what I have been advocating for years. However, these recommendations do not come from me, but instead from this month’s PMI Today magazine. Couple this with the announcement last week at the PMI Global Congress in Denver that the next PMI Virtual Community to be created will be for Agile Methods and we begin to see a promising trend. I reported previously that the PMBOK v4 Guide due out later this year has more iterative lifecycle coverage. […]

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Agile Project Management, Leadership, Travel

Teaching in Costa Rica

Next week I will be teaching two one-day agile workshops and an executive summary session in Costa Rica. The courses are organized by Invenio University Research and Education and will be taking place in the capital, San Jose. I will be travelling with my friend and colleague Dustin Aleksiuk, who usefully speaks great Spanish and lived in Costa Rica for a while. Dustin has translated my slides into Spanish and the plan is for me to be viewing an English slide deck and Dustin keeping the Spanish projected slide deck in sync. We have a real-time interpreter and headsets for attendees and the whole thing should seem as if it is in Spanish. Questions and Answers will go through the […]

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Uncategorized

Three Dimensions of High Performance

To be truly effective you need ability and passion. Some people use the formula:  Performance = Ability * Passion However, you also need time to dedicate to the work at hand; and so Availability factors in also.  In the volunteer world we often say we are looking for 3 key attributes: Talent (Ability in some useful skill) Passion (motivation to do it) Availability (time to commit to it) In other words you need to have skills, enthusiasm, and time to dedicate to something in order to be effective. (This also applies to paid work too, but because we get paid for things it is easy to mix-up motivation with payment and forget about considering if we are passionate/motivated about the work.) […]

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