I was minding my own business when I noticed a tweet by Alistair Cockburn.  He clearly thought something was funny so I figured I’d check it out.  What awaited me was this video.  If you understand Agile or just interested about it, you should spend the next 3 minutes and 14 seconds enjoying a creative perspective on why Agile might not work for you.  It’s very tongue-and-cheek.  You should also check this out: http://www.pmi.org/resources/pages/agile.aspx Again, don’t take it too serious.

With the PMI Global Congress coming to Washington DC in just over a month, I’m curious who I’m going to get to meet.  Want to grab a cup of coffee?  Let me know!  Send me an email or post a comment below that you’ll be coming to town.  I look forward to seeing you!

On occasion, I read a piece that speaks to me.  Recently, it was a post titled The Yellow Brick Road – What Do Your Stakeholders Expect, written by Bas de Baar, an independent project consultant based in the Netherlands.  Bas clearly articulated a story of his youth and aligned it with a stakeholder management strategy.

I loved this piece. If there’s one thing I think project managers and the like need help on, it’s developing stakeholder management strategies. I sometimes sit in meetings, as an observer, to see how the vendor is interacting with the client. Representing the client, I know what makes them anxious and what doesn’t. As the meeting progresses and the client feels they are not being provided enough information, they commonly become very anxious.

In the Yellow Brick Road piece, Bas described fond childhood memories of an annual family vacation.  As part of the planning process, his father wrote detailed driving instructions on how to find their way.  Based on the checkpoints his father had documented, Bas knew how much further they needed to travel to reach the next checkpoint or complete their journey.

Now imagine how much different his memories could have been, if his father hadn’t provided him with those documented checkpoints? Imagine if every time Bas become anxious from the long trip, he had to ask his father how much further they had to go?

I seemingly remember, as a child, doing this every time I got into the car.

How much longer until we’re there?

5 minutes

Put yourself in your stakeholders’ shoes.  Try to align your communications and management strategy with their current perception of the journey.

Graphic: Pictofigo

An interesting thing happened when I was approached by a coworker asking for assistance in completing his PMP application.  His concern was he would be audited and word around the office was that I had been audited by PMI and did just fine.  Both facts were true and I was more than happy to assure him that as long as he was factual about what he put in this application, he would have nothing to worry about.  All the same, he said he would feel more comfortable if I would review what he wrote.

He admitted that what he was going to show me wasn’t his actual application, but rather, he was working on a spreadsheet to make sure he had his bases covered.  Good idea, I said, show me what you have. What he brought up was an Excel workbook, provided by another coworker who had recently attended a PMP boot camp. I noticed right away that he had 7 projects listed totaling over 10,000 hours.  What really caught my attention was the breakdown of hours across the process groups. Below is an example of one of the projects.  Names and titles have been changed but the hours were not.

I asked him how he came to such exact amounts per process group.  He pointed to help text listed in the bootcamp-provided workbook.

In the following worksheet, we will try to compile the hours you spent on each Process Group for each of your project. Eventually, you will need these hours to fill in the PMP Application… Let us assume that this is the typical project manager job with about 85% of the hours involving tasks similar to those in the Typical PM Task worksheet.  Assuming this was a typical project manager task with a rough distribution of 5% of these hours in Initiation, 25% of hours in Planning, 50% of hours in Executing, 15% of hours in Controlling, and the remaining 5% in Closing.

When I asked him to explain what I was seeing, he stated he had worked on the project for a year and took a 2 week vacation.  (2,000 hours).  Then he said something that surprised me.  Well, the worksheet said to put percentages in so that’s what I’m doing. My response was “Noooooo, that’s for a “typical” PM doing “typical” PM tasks. I told him was listed in the help text was a calculated average and only there as a guideline.    In addition, I clarified, I didn’t think he could map 100% of his time to deliverables.

I told him that he needs to look at mapping his work experience to the process groups like he would if he were identifying and scheduling activities of any project. (Reference the PMBOK for items in blue)

• Define Scope (Section 5.2 – Page 112)
• Create Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) (Section 5.3 – Page 116)
• Define Activities (Section 6.1 – Page 133)
• Sequence Activities (Section 6.2 Page 136)
• Estimate Activity Durations (Section 6.4 – Page 146)

Now, you may disagree with what I proposed but I hope you understand my frustration after seeing something like this.  First, he didn’t read the instructions correctly.  Second, his primary concern was being audited, not meeting the fundamental requirement of detailing work activities.   This brings me to my final point.  Before defining scope, you need to collect requirements (Section 5.1 – Page 105).

I’ve come to find out, he doesn’t even want to get the PMP. He’s being pressured by his company to get the certification.  The whole situation could be fodder to half a dozen posts or articles.  I don’t know what part bothers me more, that he missed the assumptions listed by the PMP boot camp or the fact that his company is pressuring him to get a certification that he doesn’t want.

I wish him luck.

Every month I get a copy of PMI Today and I traditionally annotate 3 data points: New PMP® for the month, new PMPs year-to-date (YTD), and total number of active PMPs.

I’m going to change what I’m reporting because PMI isn’t providing YTD totals anymore.  I could calculate the number but it doesn’t provide much additional value.  Instead, I’m going to start including the other credentials in other posts.  This post will be limited to the PMP counts.

The PMP certification rate dropped by almost 1,000 in July to 3,687.  There are now a total of 393,413 active PMPs.

The current trend predicts PMI will hit 400,000 active PMP credential holders before the PMI Global Conference in October.  You read it here first.  I bet there will be an announcement at the conference.

I want to congratulate those 3,687 out there who passed the exam in July.

Any comments about the current numbers?