"My Life As A PM Is Over: The Company Just Went Agile!"

Last night was my presentation on Agile Project Management to the local chapter of the Project Management Institute, and based on the electronic polling results that were collected right after I finished, I think I did fairly well. Each member of the audience was given a handheld device about the size of a small calculator and then asked to respond to a series of statements along the lines of: "The topic presented by tonight's speaker was informative and interesting" and "Tonight's speaker appeared to be well-prepared" by selecting, on their device, either "1" (strongly agree), "2" (agree), "3" (disagree) or "4" (strongly disagree). For those who were having trouble figuring out how to work their new toys (since this was the first time they had tried this approach), I helpfully offered the advice, "Just press the button labeled '1'!" In most cases, I received scores where the total of "1"s and "2"s put me at or above the 80% mark, which was gratifying to see.

As for the material itself, I had worried that I had too much to cover in 2 hours, but somehow it all worked out, even with a 15-minute break midway through. I spent the first half introducing Agile, and then called for a short break. However, I asked that, during the break, everyone write down how they thought they might react if they went into work on Monday and their boss walked up to them and announced, "Guess what? We're going Agile in a month!" Just before resuming, I collected their responses and read them out for everyone to hear. Here are some representative samples of what I got:

• "Agile? Can we get the Functional Managers to support it?"
• "Good, [but] first educate the clients."
• "Let's go!"
• "Can we still perform accurate Earned Value analysis?"
• "Great, but how do I co-locate with my global team?"
• "1 week cycles??"
• "But what's wrong with RUP?"
• "Great, let's try it. As long as we follow ALL of the steps, not only parts of it."
• "How do we break deliverables into iteration-sized chunks?"
• "Risk of scope creep."
• "How do you budget??"
• "What are the signs that we NEED Agile?"

and my personal favourite:

• "Do Agile? We don't even do Project Management!"

What impressed me most about these results, aside from the variety, was that it was pretty clear that everyone had been paying attention to what I'd been saying up to that point and attempting to rationalize it against their own experiences and work environments. Virtually no one was writing off the notion of "going Agile" as some crank thought experiment that they could laugh off or simply ignore. Also, I'd say that about 1/4 of the responses were of the "Let's go!" variety, showing that there was at least some buy-in among a group that was mostly hearing about Agile for the first time.

During the Q&A session at the end, many of those same concerns were expressed once again. One woman was sure that no budget would ever be approved without a guarantee that the work done would match what was being approved, to which I said, "If that sort of arrangement is working out for you right now, then I don't know why you'd ever want to move to Agile. The organizations that move to an Agile methodology are the ones where things change considerably between initial concept and final installation." Another fellow was understandably concerned about how to create automated tests to replace the extensive manual testing that they currently do at the end of each project, and I said that that was one area where you'd want to allocate time in order to research the new products and services that are coming out on the market for that purpose. "But in the end," I said, "you really don't have any choice: you need to have automated testing, or you'll never be able to do short cycles." I also got asked whether Agile was really only appropriate for "UI companies", to which I was able to describe some of the very-different types of organizations I've heard of - or seen! - doing Agile.

The moderator eventually had to call an end to the Q&A, as I think it might've gone on for quite a while longer otherwise. I received a $25 Chapters gift card for my troubles (which was nice, and unexpected) and eventually took off home to unwind. Sadly I didn't make any book sales, despite having several copies with me for just that reason. Maybe next time!