Travel – Leading Answers

September 11, 2024October 3, 2026Agile Project Management, Books, Events, Travel

Learn to Surf: Riding the Waves of Change Impacting Project Management

As a kid, I grew up in Cornwall, UK surfing the cold Atlantic coast beaches of Newquay and Porthtowan. Next week I am excited to be in Los Angeles presenting on waves of change and hybrid approaches. This talk is particularly poignant since it will be 20 years since I gave my first PMI Global presentation on hybrid techniques, which was also in Los Angeles (Link). It’s like coming full circle from talking about something new to returning to see it mainstream. Of course, it was not really new in 2004. People have been combining agile concepts with more plan-driven approaches for much longer. Tom Gilb was doing this in the 1980s. In 2000, I helped co-author what I think […]

December 15, 2023October 3, 2026Agile Project Management, Events, Travel

3 Themes Shaping Tomorrow’s Project Environment

PMI had a reputation for being conservative and slow to adopt new ideas or technology (it was slow to embrace agility, for instance). So, I was pleased to see three progressive themes dominating the sessions at the recent PMI Global Summit in Atlanta, Georgia. Theme 1: Putting Artificial Intelligence to WorkGoing into the conference, I knew artificial intelligence would be a pervasive topic. There were great AI presentations and AI-powered tools being demoed in the exhibit area, and some impressive announcements from PMI: The "Generative AI Overview for Project Managers" course had more than 66,000 signups in the first few weeks of being offered—and saw an impressive 2,850 additional ones at the conference alone. PMI launched its own "Project Infinity" […]

October 13, 2023October 3, 2026Agile Project Management, Events, Tailoring Approaches, Travel

Is the Agile Movement at an Inflection Point?

Inflection Point – a critical change in direction. Yesterday, a couple of data points crossed my desk that got me wondering if the Agile movement has succeeded and will now be absorbed into the mainstream. First, Jurgen Appelo posted about how the Agile Movement is Shrinking, but the Agile Mindset is Growing. He explained that some Agile conference attendance numbers are shrinking while business change is accelerating, and the most sought-after skills are collaboration and agility. An alternative explanation is that people do not go to in-person conferences as much anymore. COVID taught us that remote is possible. Anyone who tried to get Taylor Swift tickets knows in-person can be expensive, and maybe on video is the next best thing. […]

April 18, 2023September 27, 2025Events, Personal Agility, Teams, Travel

Agile Open Canada

I am excited to be attending Agile Open Canada in Banff this May. If you are free May 29 and 30, please come and join us! It is a great Open Space unconference that brings people together to share their latest ideas, challenges, lessons learned, and experiments around agile approaches. Hosted at the Banff Park Lodge and only $130 CDN for two days of events with food, drinks and optional activities. Why not stay a day or two longer? Late May / early June is a great time to visit Banff National Park. I hope to see you there. Full details here.

March 29, 2019Agile Project Management, Events, Travel, Weblogs

Agile 2019 Presentations

I learned this week that two of my presentation submissions for the Agile 2019 conference in Washington D.C. August 6-10 have been accepted. I was very lucky to get two accepted as they received nearly 2,000 submissions for around 250 slots. It should be fun and I am really looking forward to it. My talks will be on moving beyond agile approaches and case studies in transitioning from projects to products. Here are the outlines:

January 1, 2019Agile Project Management, Events, Leadership, Personal Agility, Travel, Warning Signs, Weblogs

Focusing on Results, Not Agile Approaches

Quarter Century 2019 marks the 25 year anniversary of Scrum and DSDM. I was involved in the creation of DSDM in 1994 and was an early adopter of Scrum and FDD shortly afterward. Now, having been at this for a quarter of a century I am reflecting on where my journey has taken me compared to others. I am agnostic about agile. I value the mindset and goals more than approaches that preach a single path. This has had mixed blessings for me. I remain agnostic and impartial, but I have not jumped on any of the approach bandwagons.

December 17, 2018Agile Project Management, Events, Travel

DIPMF 2018

I have just returned from the 2018 Dubai International Project Management Forum (DIPMF). It was my second year presenting there and this year I hosted a session called “Agile: Not New, but Now Necessary”. It traced several techniques back through history and explained how lean, agile, and design thinking approaches share common guidance for building high performing teams. During the conference, I mainly attended the agile and artificial intelligence (AI) sessions. Having written about AI augmented project management previously I was interested to learn more about Microsoft’s PMOtto assistant that uses Azure Machine Learning Studio. PMOtto has a chat-bot interface that uses their LUIS (Language Understanding) machine learning based natural language system to understand questions. It integrates with Office 365 […]

November 12, 2018Agile Project Management, Events, Leadership, Lean, Teams, Travel

GOAT18

I am excited to be a keynote speaker at the Gatineau-Ottawa Agile Tour (GOAT) conference on November 30th. Along with Mary Poppendieck, we will be leading a day dedicated to learning about agile culture and collaboration. The Gatineau Ottawa Agile Tour is an annual conference in the heart of the nation’s capital, focused on sharing and learning. GOAT has run for 7 years and is part of the Agile Tour that takes place in 90 cities worldwide. Click to see the Keynotes Overview and the Sessions Previews. I hope to see you there.

September 6, 2018Agile Project Management, Events, Games, Travel

Agile Animations

Following my Agile 2018 conference workshop, I had a couple of people ask how I created the smooth PowerPoint animations. I have always liked using animations to explain ideas since they help me understand processes. My logic has been, if they help me understand it, then they should help others understand it too. Visual learning, and especially animations, are valuable on knowledge work projects. Animations help us overcome the three challenges of knowledge work: Invisible – designs and ideas are often abstract and hard to visualize. Intangible – bits not atoms. Since we cannot see or feel ideas there is a real danger other people might interpret them differently, leading to difficulties with collaboration and problem-solving. Transient – Our work […]

June 29, 2018Agile Project Management, Leadership, Lean, NoProjects, Risk Management, Tailoring Approaches, Teams, Theory of Constraints, Travel, Warning Signs

Agile 2018 Conference – Unraveling Team Dependencies

I am excited to be presenting on the Enterprise Agile track at the Agile 2018 conference in San Diego, August 7. I have worked with several organizations this year that had issues with work dependencies between teams. My session called “Two-Pizza Team Heartburn Relief: Solutions to Team Dependencies” highlights the shift to global rather than local optimization. We will investigate dependency problems through animations and simulations and then explore some candidate solutions. Each brings their own issues – if these problems were solvable they would have been already, but the suggestions do help considerably. Here is the description from the conference program: Small teams are great – until they cause bigger problems than they solve. Small teams can communicate more […]