Author: Geetanjali Bhat, PMP

Dear members and newsletter subscribers,

Beautiful Sunshine and Bright Skies this month, has a special message for all of us giving us more hope and courage to face the challenging times. We are able to se a great sign through hopes and smiles spread across the country. People working hard to bring back the cheerful times that we have cherished and rejoiced so far. I am certain about challenging times transforming into good times soon.

PMI Switzerland Chapter is actively working towards ground-breaking changes and setting new paths.  Online Events launched in March2020, continue to make it a successful breakthrough through varied subjects like “Achieving Discipline in Agile”, “Open Spaces”. With great subject matter expertise, PMI has been ensuring latest contents in tough times through insightful events.

Members or Non-Members participating Online events had insightful takeaways from those sessions. It’s great to see that we were able to put PMI’s structures and processes today in these challenging times into practice. With successful PMI online coffee meets and online events, I am sure there is no stopping us into learning and growing more. Change has definitely brought a newer paths and goals in all our lives.

I would like to ask you all to Stay Safe and Healthy. Let’s all think positive and keep learning ensuring for better tomorrow.

Wishing all of you Stay Safe and Healthy!

Cheers!

Geetanjali Bhat

Author: Stefania Tanasescu, PMP

Dear Project Management enthusiasts,

Do you want to learn more about Social Project Management? Are you wondering what exactly Social Project Management is? In this case, please register for the following 3h online workshop with Peter Taylor on 15th September which is published on our webpage www.pmi-switzerland.ch/events.

Social Project Management 

A project is a temporary endeavour where people come together to work towards a common

goal and purpose; it is therefore a temporary endeavour that must rely on a social system of

communication and collaboration in order to succeed.

Social project management is a non-traditional way of organising projects and managing

project performance and progress aimed at delivering, at the enterprise level, a common

goal for the business but harnessing the performance advantages of a collaborative Community.

There is a paradigm shift ongoing in many organisations that is about finding a practical

balance between the challenges to traditional project management made by Project

Management 2.0 - which encouraged a move away from centralised control of projects and

instead promoted the value of team collaboration – and the practical recognition that large

scale projects do require a stronger form of centralised control and governance.

Who should attend?

The remote workshop is directed at anyone leading projects or leads a community of project

managers, and who are keen to understand, and be prepared for, the transformation

towards Social Project Management.

Benefits

You will learn about the paradigm shift to ‘Social Project Management’ and what the benefits

are, as well as the challenges and opportunities.

At the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Clearly describe the Project Management 2.0 world and the progression towards Social Project Management
• Understand the benefits of a decentralised and collaborative project world
• Appreciate what a project manager needs to understand about harnessing this social world and what the obstacles can potentially be, and how to overcome them
• To have ‘top ten’ list of things to do and to avoid when taking your project team ‘social’

About the speaker - Peter Taylor

An experienced Change and Transformation Specialist who has operated at a global scale within many industries, for organisations ranging from small to enterprise.

Peter is the author of the number 1 bestselling project management book ‘The Lazy Project Manager’, along with many other books on Project Management, PMO development, Executive Sponsorship, Transformation Leadership, and Speaking Skills.

He has delivered over 380 lectures around the world in over 25 countries and has been described as ‘perhaps the most entertaining and inspiring speaker in the project management world today’.

www.thelazyprojectmanager.com

www.thepmtribe.com

Author: Adi Muslic, PMP

“Project Management, It’s All Bollocks!” was the 5th online event organized by PMI Switzerland on 2nd of July. If you missed it, this is a 5 minute read to learn more about it.

The presenter, Peter Taylor, is an accomplished communicator, leader, and professional speaker, popular around the world for keynotes and as an event host. He is also known as the author of "The Lazy Project Manager" book.

"Project Management, It’s all Bollocks !" is also the title of the book that Peter and Susie Palmer-Trew wrote together. It is explaining the basics of project management to new project managers, project managers revisiting those basics, and those who deliver changes as a part of their day job (but are not project managers) in their organizations that are not recognized as projects.

Peter, made the presentation quite interactive by the use of the Mentimeter tool. It helped to engage the audience right from the beginning.

Peter started by asking: What do you love about project management? On the screen we could see: people, collaboration, making a difference, bringing value, getting things done, etc.

The next question was: What do you hate about project management? Answers were: Stake-holders, politics, process, admin work, tools.

And this is, Peter told us, what the first chapter of the book is about, all annoying things in project management.

Then Peter introduced the second chapter, as the essence of project management - the Seven Cracking Ideas.

For this article, I decided to pick one of them: Communication versus Engagement!

It tells us that we have to know our project management community. We need to know their needs and expectations. We should not spend much time focusing on those who are against or unsupportive. We should make sure that those who are supportive or at least undecided receive clear and consistent communications. Steady regular communications are also important.
An engaged audience is much more responsive and active in contributing to value creation.

Peter also shared a couple of examples from his rich experience advising that we should always explain what project management is about and how to contribute to value creation.

The event ended with a Q&A session. One of the questions that attracted my attention was whether we are allowed a failure in a consultant’s role. Peter’s answer was yes. He added that we need to have an open and honest relationship built with the client. They understand that we all make mistakes, as long as you do what you can to mitigate those problems.

If you like to watch it, 1hr 15min long event recording is available on the PMI Switzerland’s YouTube channel.

Kind regards,
Adi

Author: Adi Muslic, PMP

On 18th June, over 100 participants from several countries joined the session organized by the PMI Switzerland Online events team. The presenter, Mark Lines is PMI VP and along with Scott Ambler, Co-creator of Disciplined Agile (DA).

Mark started the presentation by saying that with Disciplined Agile (DA) PMI is transitioning from traditional to more agile project management. The next version of the PMBOK will have even more agile content. And it will be a combination of traditional, hybrid, and agile project management principles.

Mark also added that there will be still a place for traditional projects. Launching of the Basics of DA course was delivered in the traditional way. 

Agile has many different practices. A combination of these practices makes a method. If you learn practices you will be able to apply it to various methods. This is why DA is also called a toolkit.

DA promotes that having a choice is good, Scrum is good in many situations, but in some situations, Scrum is not good. A hybrid or traditional method might be better. SAFe is good in scaled agile implementations, but may not be suitable for all scaled agile situations. Teams should choose the appropriate lifecycle that suits them.

There are 3 ways DA helps to increase agility :

1. Enables you to optimize agile teams.

2. Enables you to extend agility to the entire organization.

3. Lets you accelerate value delivery in scaled agile solutions.

As we already learned in "Achieving discipline in an agile environment" online event, agile projects require Risk Management and Governance. In agile projects, we still need to provide visibility on the progress to sponsors or customers or provide reports. 

DA comes with lifecycle phases: Inception, Construction, and Transition. They could be used or not, based on lifecycle choice. DA also incorporates a number of light-weigt milestones.

A typical DA team: Team member, Team lead (could be called also Project Manager or Scrum Master or else.), Product Owner, Stakeholder, Architecture Owner (this role is unique to DA and can be seen as a Technical lead).

We were also briefly introduced to Disciplined Dev Ops.

Successful agile organizations keep evolving their agility. Adopting a single methodology such as Scrum or SAFe results in limited improvements. To achieve true business agility we need to choose our Agile WoW, by building a methodology for our unique situation.

Another key to customizing your agile methodology is by use of the very classical Continuous Improvement process (Kaizen loop). It is also important to have everyone understand the available tools. If part of the organization involved in the projects does not understand agile principles they will not be adding value to Agile delivery.

With everyone understanding where you go, you can move to Guided Continuous Improvement and accelerate value delivery in scaled agile situations. However, putting metrics to measure the improvements might be difficult if there are no baseline metrics in place. It can be overcome by starting where you are, capture available data, and keep learning and improving.

The combination of Disciplined Agile and FLEX will be covering Agile at Scale. The DA FLEX lifecycle will help with the acceleration of value delivery at scale.

At the end, Mark mentioned that in addition to the existing DA certifications, additional certifications are currently in development. DA for SAFe will be available in July.

The event ended with Q&A. The event recording is available on the PMI Switzerland YouTube channel.

The testimonial, one of the participants provided in the event survey, is a nice summary of what we all experienced: “Thank you for this opportunity! Disciplined Agile promises an answer for the future!”