Partnership Spotlight: PMI Switzerland Conducts Special Training Sessions for Displaced Professionals from Ukraine

Author: Mafalda Amaro, Social Impact & Youth Coordinator

On 25th-26th November 2023 PMI Switzerland Chapter conducted an exclusive two-day online training for Ukrainian displaced professionals. This initiative was delivered in partnership with Bevel ON, a Swiss association that helps displaced professionals from Ukraine integrate into their host countries and restart their careers, with the Capacity Building Programme for Ukraine (Cohort 4). 

Recognizing the critical role of project management in today's dynamic business landscape, this specialized training offered participants invaluable insights for those who were just embarking on a project management career or seeking to enhance existing skills and enrich their experience. 

The training was led by Adi Muslic, Vice President of Sponsors and partners of PMI Switzerland, and Mafalda Amaro, Social Impact & Youth Coordinator of PMI Switzerland, and it gathered 50 participants from Switzerland, EU countries, as well as from Ukraine. 

In addition to Project Management Basics and PMI Agile Processes, AI Capabilities, Megatrends, and Power Skills were among the topics presented in the sessions. 

PMI Switzerland Chapter and Bevel ON Association started to collaborate earlier this year, following the successful project management training session in June, for the previous Capacity Building Programme for Ukraine (Cohort 3), this initiative has turned into a strong synergetic partnership to enhance the impactful social tribe, and to be continued in 2024. 

About Bevel ON: 

Bevel ON is a Swiss Non-Profit Association (Geneva-based) established in May 2022, and is focused on social impact programs for displaced professionals, including refugees, in Switzerland and EU countries. 

More information about the programme can be found here.

PMI is AGILE!

Author: Agnieszka Skalska, PMP®
	11+ years of experience in global business transformations, project and program management. Executed over 20 projects for financial services, management consulting and manufacturing industries. Solid business acumen in Operational Excellence, Project Management, Change Management and Information Technology. Always following the fundamental values of integrity, innovation and collaboration. Growth Mindset.

 All around the world there is a lot of buzz about the need for agility. Most of the organizational structures and processes that have been developed more than a century ago, now seems to be outdated. They were built for control and stability, not for innovation and speed. Of course, there is no one standard solution that works for every company and for sure agile is also not a cure for every disease. Every team should explore what works the best for them and decide on their way of working. As a global economy has started to evolve rapidly, one thing is certain, the project management techniques must be adjusted, combined, and/or tailored. PMI is responding to these needs by incorporating all Agile Practices into one approach, called Disciplined Agile. 

Picture 1. Disciplined Agile Concept. (Source 1) 

Disciplined Agile a tool kit that harnesses hundreds of Agile practices to guide you to the best way of working for your team or organization. (Source 2) Disciplined Agile is not a framework, but rather a toolkit that focuses on the decisions you need to consider, the options available to you, and the trade-offs associated with these options. It shows you how to effectively combine strategies from Scrum, Kanban, SAFe®, and many other approaches in a tailorable and scalable manner. Organizations that adopt Disciplined Agile go to market sooner, deliver value faster and make their customers happier. (Source 3) 

PMI offers five types of Agile certifications:

Picture 2. PMI Agile Certifications. (Source 1) 

Disciplined Agile Scrum Master (DASM) certification will help you to understand the DA mindset and its underlying principles, such as pragmatism, the power of choice, and adapting to context. It gives an opportunity to learn about the fundamentals of agile and lean, and how to use both approaches to produce business value. It presents multiple agile and lean techniques from methods such as Scrum, Kanban, SAFe®, and more. You will learn how to put these techniques into action and ensure effective implementation. (Source 4)

Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) certification takes a deep dive into the DA tool kit to develop a comprehensive understanding of the hundreds of practices and strategies it contains and the trade-offs of applying them. It shows how to apply the DA tool kit to guide teams in choosing and evolving your best way of working (WoW) in any situation. After the course you will feel comfortable with using the DA tool kit to solve complex challenges commonly encountered in both software and operational business teams. You will learn how to lead agile teams through key enterprise activities, such as planning, coordinating, and reporting, and be ready to show your improvements in areas where your organization is struggling. You will get a deep understanding of how to improve value delivery for your customers by empowering others in your organization, nurturing emotional intelligence, and resolving conflicts. (Source 5)

Disciplined Agile Value Stream Consultant (DAVSC) certification gives an opportunity to determine the best place for an organization to start – portfolio management, product management or development area. As a DAVSC, you will be equipped with a tool kit to tailor an organization’s improvement plan based on the unique needs. It gives an ability to train an organization to continue to improve on their own and get know how to accelerate value delivery at scale. (Source 6)

Disciplined Agile Coach (DAC) certification helps to understand how to align teams with organizational strategies and goals to enable agile transformation. It provides guidance how to facilitate culture change/ transformation and how to accelerate process improvement. It teaches how to master the Disciplined Agile tool kit and show teams the best Way of Working (Choose Your Wow) in the situation they currently face. (Source 7)

PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)® certification is created by agilists for agilists. The PMI-ACP spans many approaches to agile such as Scrum, Kanban, Lean, extreme programming (XP) and test-driven development (TDD.) It will increase your versatility, wherever your projects may take you. (Source 8)

               ⇒ Building True Agility Across Your Business Starts at PMI! ⇐               

To sum up, here are 3 Top Reasons for Attaining a Disciplined Agile Certification:

• Increase your knowledge. DA certification requires a comprehensive understanding of Disciplined Agile Delivery, which in turn describes how all aspects of agile principles and practices fit together in an enterprise-class environment.

• Demonstrate your professionalism. DA certification indicates to employers your dedication to improving your knowledge and skills.

• Advance your career. As you demonstrate your increased knowledge base and leadership, DA certification can help you attain that new position or role.

 Video 1 : The Business Agility Starts Here (Source 2) 

List of Sources:

1. https://youtu.be/0aXstBAs_U4 
2. Foundation for Business Agility | Disciplined Agile (pmi.org)
3. Agile Certifications (pmi.org)
4. Disciplined Agile Scrum Master DASM (pmi.org)
5. Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master Certification | PMI
6. Disciplined Agile Value Stream Consultant Certification | PMI
7. Disciplined Agile Coach (DAC) Certification | PMI
8. Agile Certified Practitioner | PMI-ACP

Author: Patryk Nosalik, PMP

Note: this article has two parts - about the facilitation format itself and about the theme of the Open Space event.

Facilitation format
In line with the agile format of Open Spaces (OS), we take feedback from participants and from within the team during our retrospectives. And by how we feel the last Open Space went, we think we’ve got the format working well for our community. Therefore, we shall generally keep to the proposed format I last shared here , though in light of the continuous improvement and reaction to participant needs, we shall try to implement the following changes:

1. Introductions in main room by all participants:
We aim to allow 15 seconds per person which is enough to share: name / position/ company or industry / what you’re coming with; in one sentence. This helps everyone to know who is who.

2. In every breakout room, we really want to ensure everyone in the room gets a chance to provide some brief input into the question or issue at hand before the discussion goes completely freeform. The peers of yours who play the role of facilitator will have this as an explicit goal. Why? So that there is more inclusion especially for the more introverted, more active listening, and elicitation, which should lead to a greater elicited collective intelligence.

3. After the last breakout room, we’d really like everyone to offer at least one bit of feedback live; in one sentence. Why? We really want to address the needs of the community and also the last chance for eliciting participation. We’ll also use the same slido tool that we use for capturing the backlog of ideas, at the very end of the meeting to find out what themes we should have for future sessions. (I have a dozen ideas myself, but that’s not the point - we want to hear yours!)

4. To allow for more networking and chatting after the event, just like at a physical event, you can hang on for a short while. After the official ending (where we share the PDU code), the Zoom session will be open for 15 more minutes to allow a continuation or finalisation of certain topics, contact exchange, etc.
Want to learn experience or get involved with Open Spaces? Come on the 20th April to find out more!

Theme
Last year we covered agile topics, and whilst this was perhaps attractive or aspirational, it seemed most participants found this not in line with their actual experience. At a webinar, everyone can come uninformed and come out a bit wiser. At an Open Space, diversity works better, so that while some people can come purely to ask and learn, you really should share your experience for the session to be valuable. Now there may appear a risk if everyone were to come ‘uninformed’ (which I doubt in our community) that no-one will be there to answer with a solution, but at least you’ll come out with an action plan on how to solve the issue. 

Our first OS this year was around the PMBOK knowledge areas and we did not run out of discussion! 

Following on from this, we’d like to look at the tool project managers use. It should be especially relevant for PMO’s who in a ‘projectified’ economy, are all the more central to their organisations success, and whilst “only a poor workman blames his tools”, the converse “you are only as sharp as your knife” is certainly true too. Thus, to be competitive, PMOs should be very clear on the benefits of the tools they invest in.

What is the approach your organisation has? Do you have a dedicated PM/PMIS/PPMS tool or is it an extension of an ITSM product? What impact does this have on the way you run your portfolio and programs?

At the other, sometimes personally touching, end of the spectrum, if you have been out of work perhaps due to COVID, could it be that organisations have moved ahead with digitalisation of their tools to such an extent that It could be daunting to re-enter the workplace? Just think, have you used Slack? A few months ago I didn’t know anyone that was an active user. Yet Teams was behind Slack in 2018. Then from Nov 2019 it went from 20 million users to 115 million users by the end of 2020. If you weren’t in work, you wouldn’t have had much chance to use this and the rich integration it offers with Office 365. How do you use Teams for project management?

Of course, the joy of Open Spaces comes not from a pre-planned agenda, but what you the participants really come with. We look forward to hearing your questions and issues around the choice and use of project management tools on the 20th April. Register here

Author: Adi Muslic, PMP

The workshop prepared by the Alvission team, Frank, Antje, Frederic, and Philipp, was divided into the 5 different sections :

1. Disciplined Agile Introduction
2. Implementation Practice Example
3. 5 steps on how to chose your WoW
4. Certifications
5. Q&A

The 20 minutes DA introduction was well presented by Antje. She used many real-life examples, to demonstrate how the DA toolkit could be used to make better decisions inside of our organizations, and how it helps us to chose our WoW – Way of Working.

Antje also presented how we could better optimize our teams – not only IT teams but all teams in an organization, such as Finance, Sales, Marketing, Legal, etc. Every team should have its own WoW. She also explained that each organization was a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) and how important it was to understand interactions among teams.
The following section was about business agility.

The DA tool kit also enables us to extend agility beyond teams to the entire organization. This we can achieve by using the DA four levels model :

1. Foundation
2. Disciplined DevOps
3. Value Stream
4. Disciplined Agile Enterprise

The DA tool kit lets you accelerate value delivery in scaled agile situations. Antje briefly presented the DA Mindset. She ended her presentation with a quick introduction to Process Goals.

Philip started his presentation with a «Hyperspeed overview of DA», which highlighted some of the key advantages of the Disciplined Agile toolkit over other Agile frameworks that decide our WoW for us even before we start. Philip made it very clear that «One Size» does not fit all process decisions.

He continued with «Process Tailoring Decisions» with the DA Toolkit. He demonstrated how we could easily choose our WoW by crossing all process elements that do not fit our WoW.

The following section was about DA Lightweight Governance, demonstrating how Outcome-oriented gates align well with PMO practices.

In the last section, Philip explained how to move from strategy to implementation and use the GQM - Goal Question Metric.

Philip concluded his presentation by telling us why we should use the DA Toolkit: It contains everything yet prescribes nothing.

Frederic walked us through 5 steps on how to chose our WoW that was a very easy-to-use practical example. I use this opportunity to invite you to see it in the recorded session: https://youtu.be/QAmz_rb918c.

Frank presented the DA certifications and compared them to the PMI – ACP certification. He also explained different levels of DA certifications and related requirements. He finished with a short presentation of the Alvisson training team.

In the Q&A session, the Alvisson team explained the Flex value stream and differences between SAFe and DA.