Here are the slides for my Passion for Projects keynote Spotify – the unproject culture (+ failure story “How to burn €1 billion”).
So, now I’ve spent 2 days with 600 projects managers at a PMI conference. Totally different from the usual crowds I hang out with. Fascinating to hear stories about project management successes and failures in all kinds of industries – from warzone reconstruction projects to eurovision song contest.
I was a bit nervous (OK more than a bit) getting up at the biggest-ever scandinavian gathering of project managers – and illustrating to them how the standard project model really doesn’t fit well for IT product development, and how companies like Spotify actually don’t have PMs and don’t do projects (at least not the type defined by PMI)
I was happily surprised though. Instead of getting attacked for it, scores of PMs came up to me, agreeing with me, sharing similar experiences, and inspired to try agile principles in their own projects and industries.
And biggest positive surprise of all – the final keynote by Dr. Harold Kerzner, major thought leader in PM space who has written over 50 college textbooks on project management! He listed like 30 things that are wrong with traditional project management as tought in PMI textbooks, and where it all is heading in the future. He described it as a fundamental paradigm shift from PM 1.0 to PM 2.0.
According to Dr Kerzner, agile values and methods like Scrum are examples of the future of project management, and I was positively surprised at how well his description of PM 2.0 rhymed with agile values.
So what I saw was convergence – experts and practitioners arriving at the same conclusions, coming from lots of different directions. A magical feeling.
I’ve suspected it before, but talking to all these experts has made it clear to me – agile is a universal thing, way beyond just software.
I’m so glad I took the courage to get out of my comfort zone and meet these people. I wish more agile trainers and coaches would get out of the echo-chamber of agile conferences and see what’s going on in the wider world 🙂
(some sample slides from my talk below)
Great work Henrik – and it delights me to hear about the positive response you got!
Awesome presentation. Thank you for sharing!
take care
Olaf
Thanks Henrik for a great keynote. I really enjoyed it. Thanks also for sharing the slides.
I did a similar thing a couple of years ago in Norway (in norwegian: http://scrummaster.no/2011/i-lovens-hule/)
Smaller audience. Same message and conclusions.
Got polite applauds, and there was a friendly curiosity in the room and in the breaks. But of course, nothing happened afterwards.. Why should it?
Great work. I really like the slide where the project scope, budget and schedule are not respected but the stakeholders are happy. Too often, we manage our projects according to those three axes regardless stakeholders’ satisfactions.
Thanks Henrik for sharing this, I’d love to be able to see the video of your talk, do you know how I could get hold of it?
I don’t know if it was recorded, but if so I’ll post it here.
Brilliant – and agree!!!
Thanks Hendrik, nice post, and seeing the vision people are seeing in PM2.0 . Hope that there is some kind of recording – would be nice to listen through it as well.
I cannot stop wondering about what you thought of the speaker and the content in the PfP seminar where we were supposed to discuss with your neighbour “what is agile to you” (don’t you just hate those kind of exercises in a crowd?!)… Remember I asked in the end “where do you work?”…. If only I had known you were the agile/scrum expert yourselff!!!
Loved the presentation and the “language” chosen on the slides. The best speech on the whole seminar- very inspiring! Now I’d love to learn more about agile (even checked out Sporify homepage for jobs…)
It was great meeting you 🙂
Glad you liked the talk! As for the other talk, I kinda liked the “what is agile to you” part, it’s interesting to hear different people’s perceptions of what it is. And it gets people talking to each other, if just for a few minutes.
Thanks for sharing Henrik. Your style serves a plethora of audiences. I asked Greg B. the former CEO of PMI at the Berlin chapter meeting about why they did not (yet) serve a majority of their customers – the software development domain – by embracing Agile. Greg indicated PMI being open for change and not restricted to waterfall. Guess what, this was as late as autumn 2008. Interestingly PMI co-sponsored the Orlando ScrumGathering in March 2009 and seem to have merged the PDU collection pattern with ScrumAlliance in the meantime. Well there still seems to be a major gap. Thanks for helping to close for more and more contexts. Maybe some day we can build airports with Agile.
Hey – we may be getting somewhere then 🙂
Super Slides! Thanks for sharing.