Agile Project Management Course : Breaking Down Key Concepts

Roeder Consulting is pleased to announce it newest course, Agile Project Management (15 PDUs).

The use of Agile is rapidly increasing. Research from the Project Management Institute shows the use of agile tripled from December 2008 to May 2011. In Roeder Consulting’s latest course learn Agile, team dynamics, requirements gathering, estimating, executing / reporting and adopting Agile into current operations. Going beyond the generic descriptions of Agile within project management, this program uses exercises to reinforce the concepts and techniques.
Be a part of the live online course debut July 11th, July 13th, July 18th & July 20th. This course will be held in four half day sessions.

Learning Objectives

We combined our hands-on experience leading high performing development project teams, and the latest research, to create this interactive workshop, where you will:

• Understand Agile concepts
• How Agile teams and roles within them are structured
• Discuss requirements gathering through the use of User Roles and User Stories
• Prioritizing User Stories and creating a product backlog
• Estimating and Iterative Planning Basics
• Executing and progress reporting basics
• Agile within the organization

For More Information Visit:
www.roederconsulting.com/agileprojectmanagement.php
For Our Full Training Schedule Visit:
www.roederconsulting.com/projectmanagementtrainingschedule.php

Agile and World Peace

#pmot #pm #pmp

Here is a portion of the article from Steve Martin on Agile in our October Newsletter:

Agile can help enable World Peace. Well, that might be an exaggeration, but you’d be surprised at what I hear stakeholders tell me.

Managing expectations on any project is a critical skill in any industry. It takes the entire set of Sixth Sense skills to do this well: 360° Awareness, Whole Body Decisions, Adaptability, Clear Communications, Diplomacy and Persistence.

In several recent engagements, I’ve had the opportunity to help large clients transition from one or more project management methodologies to Agile, specifically Scrum. I’ve also noticed managing expectations during the transition has become more challenging. Perhaps this could be due to the high volume of published literature, blogs, webinars, etc. about Scrum. Overall, people seem to have unrealistic expectations that Agile is so powerful and so easy, that we’ll be solving world hunger, too.

While I’m an advocate of Scrum and use this approach in my projects, the plain truth is that Scrum doesn’t solve everything; Scrum is not a silver bullet. There are things Scrum does well and things it doesn’t – too numerous to list in this posting. Nevertheless, expectations must be reasonably set for organizations considering the transition.

When it comes to switching over to Scrum, managing expectations is no different than any other change initiative. There is likely a mix of information obtained by various stakeholders that spans a range of truth, falsehood and misinterpretations in between. Setting the record straight while maintaining optimism and forward momentum can be tricky. When the status quo gets challenged or an issue arises, I quite often hear stakeholders say “I thought Agile solved that.” It takes strong people skills to help reset expectations around these declarations.

To download the rest of the article, click on http://www.roederconsulting.com/newsletters.php

To learn more about A Sixth Sense for Project Management, visit our website at http://www.roederconsulting.com/