PMI Roundtable Retrospective

I was invited to be a topic expert for one of the local PMI breakfast meetings last Friday. I have to admit I was a little nervous about going to a PMI meeting as an agile expert.

My big fear was that there would be several PMPs there who would want to debate me on the minutia of project management and why agile isn't any good because...

In fact I found an audience that wasn't really familiar with the basics of the agile approach. Most were aware of this thing called agile, and some had agile projects in their organizations. But only a couple actually had any direct knowledge.

The hour went quickly as I outlined the agile principals and took a few questions on metrics and adoption.

One lady was extremely surprised that agile software development actually mapped back to the SDLC concepts she already knew. This is a sure sign that either the agile community is not communicating with our PMP brethren or most project managers are so busy doing, that they aren't learning what is going on around them.

Generally speaking I enjoyed my time with PMI and there was some about me doing another presentation for a larger evening group.