The Project Management Institute (PMI) officially launched their Agile Community of Practice at the Agile200 conference. The group's stated mission is: "To equip PMI Members with Agile skills and knowledge" Mike Griffiths has been credited with getting things moving when he issued a challenge at Agile 2007 that PMI form an Agile Specific Interest Group.
The group of volunteers who created the Agile Community of Practice (CoP) applied agile practices to the work of creating the organization. They worked in 2-week iterations and did retrospectives to improve their processes. Jesse Fewell, played a role analogous to the Product Owner on a Scrum team. In an interview recorded for the Project Shrink Podcast, Jesse gave an example of how the team reprioritized their 'backlog' in order to deliver value early. The result was the creation of a wiki where people could find information about the group, and about agile, even before all of the administrative work of group formation was complete.
The launch was celebrated at a party hosted by ThoughtWorks at their Chicago offices. The event drew over 200 people, including Martin Fowler, Jim Highsmith, Ward Cunningham, and Alistair Cockburn.
The launch was not the only PMI-related event during the Agile2009 conference. At the first evening's "Fresher's Fair" Jesse, Ainsley Nies, Brian Bozzuto, Sanjiv Augustine, and others raised awareness of the PMI's involvement and interest in the agile community.
What is an Agile Project Manager Anyway? was an interactive session, put on by Pat Reed and Jesse Fewell, which explored the role of project manager in an agile context.
Mike Cottmeyer presented The Agile PMP: Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks which examined the PMI Processes and Knowledge areas and how to adapt them to agile projects.
On the last day of formal sessions, Jesse presented the story of how the PMI Agile CoP was created, in the session Growing PMI Using Agile.
The distributed team responsible for making the PMI Agile CoP a reality includes:
- Sanjiv Augustine
- Rodney Bodamer
- Brian Bozzuto
- Mike Cottmeyer
- Mike Griffiths
- Jean Laporte
- Dan Mezick
- Ainsley Nies
- Dave Prior
- Pat Reed
- George Schlitz
- Michele Sliger
- Bob Tarne
What is your opinion of the new PMI Agile Community of Practice? Leave a comment and let us know.
