Yesterday I attended a presentation session, organized by the GPM (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Projekt Management), called “Agiles SW-Projektmangement - Ist Softwareprojektmanagement ohne agile Techniken und Werte noch verantwortbar?”, which basically means weather you can ‘afford’ to do Software Development Projects without using Agile Apporaches. Presented by Dipl.-Ing. Bernd Oestereich, Geschäftsführender Gesellschafter oose Innovative Informatik GmbH, based in Hamburg. The outline says:

Aktuelle Studien zeigen, dass agile Methoden wie Scrum, APM und XP sich immer mehr verbreiten. Ebenso bedienen sich auch viele traditionelle Projektmanager immer systematischer bei den vielen einzelnen Techniken aus dem agilen PM. Was dafür sorgt, dass die Übergänge fließend werden.
Statistiken von Standish, Gartner & Co. in den letzten Jahren zunehmend mehr erfolgreichere SW-Projekte ausweisen, so sind die absoluten Zahlen doch weiterhin unbefriedigend. Als ein entscheidender Unterschied zwischen erfolgreichen und weniger erfolgreichen Projekten wird immer wieder das so genannte agile PM angeführt.
Trotzdem ist Agilität kein Allheilmittel. Eine aktuelle gemeinsame Studie von GPM, PMI und oose zu den Erfolgsfaktoren agiler Projekte belegt, dass weniger die Wahl einer Methode wie Scrum, APM etc. erfolgsentscheidend ist, sondern das richtige Verständnis und die richtige Anwendung weniger ausgewählter Konzepte und Techniken. Welche das sind und vor allem, was das bedeutet, stellt Bernd Oestereich in seinem Vortrag dar.

Bottom Line, you should look at Agile Approaches and decide which one could work in your project, like making small iterations rather than slow motion waterfall and other approaches.

Great presentation with lots of facts. I was sitting in the audience and used a different type to minute that presentation. I used twitter to highlight the key messages. Here is the stream:

1. Attending GPM presentation in Frankfurt on agile software project management. Keen. Will start soon.
2. Interesting study results are presented. Agile vs waterfall - succesful vs unsuccessful.
3. It’s all about applying the right agile technics to the approach you are using for your software project.
4. Iterations are short and sweet. Average 4 weeks and certain technics (planning, retrospective, etc.) are to be applied.
5. Changes are welcome in agile. Requirements are designed, developed and presented to customer. Achievements secured.
6. Milestone vs timebox. Deliver a scope or deliver a timebox (things achieved in a certain timeframe).
7. Project level followed by release level followed by team- and iteration level incl feedback loops and propability questioning.
8. From project target via product features via release features and iteration features to the word order.
9. Now we see an example where agile methods have been applied. Container terminal software project in hamburg.
10. Explaining the apm-timebox-iteration-modell. Wow, what a slide @presentationzen wouldn’t like this one.
11. Question on costs. Agile more expensive but higher quality, higher likelihood to be successful, customer receives what expected.
12. Q&A almost over. Question on who would apply the approaches presented … Small number of hands. How ever, great pres.

Interesting way of floowing a presentation and stepping into a discussions with followers on Twitter. Looking forward to the next session.

After almost two weeks I have returned from Kuala Lumpur attending and presenting at the PMI Global Congress for Aisa Pacific. What a great experience.

Thanks to the PMI Team putting this great Congress together. Thanks to SK for taking us on a tour, thanks to Tim for the great accompany, thanks for Robert for the great feedback on my first run of the Risk Management Workshop and thanks to everybody attending my two sessions. It has been a pleasure presenting in fron of you, it has been a pleasure to see your participation and it has been a pleasure to share so much expertise during the hours we spent together. Also thanks to everybody for their keenness to receive the slides and the templates.

First of all the slides. You can click through them right here or download them from the slideshare.net website. The templates will be emailed to the ones that have dropped me their business card. Feel free to comment in this post I like to hear your comments about this Congress.

There is a guy called Matt, travelling around the world attracting and convincing people to dance with him in front of famous places and locations. Some of you might have seen this video that is the outcome of his journey. Viewed by almost 30 Million people there are some key lessons we can learn from the “Making of …”.
Watch the video first.

In the following Video below Matt describes the “Making of” in 5 minutes and 15 slides. He is explaining how he started the idea, how it developed and how he was able with the help of his girlfriend to attract people all over the world to dance with him. He planned it all upfront and found models for different cultures and age groups. He also explains why the second take was always the good one.

And then see what happens after his presentation … Unbelievable.

It shows how things can be planned in advance with a different, intelligent and creative approach and how a great outcome can be presented as a video plus in a short presentation.

Again, a week ago we had our November PMI Chapter Meeting for the Queensland Chapter and again a great speaker with some new ideas. This time we didn’t focus on the classic areas of project management but looked at relationships in projects and how the could impact the success and risk of project failure.
Graham Scott, the presenter, is an Organisational Psychologist with Masters qualifications. Prior to studying Psychology Graham worked in the Construction Industry at trade and Management levels. For the past thirteen years Graham has being working in Projects mostly in recovery around “communication” and “people issues”. Graham is running the company ORG consulting and can be reached via www.orgconsulting.com.au.
Graham is such an expiring inspiring speaker and gave a lot of examples, even by looking at the NASA Columbia and Challenger disasters to talk about effective relationships and how they could impact the project.
The presentation highlighted the need for effective management of relationships in projects. It covered relationships from a risk management perspective and showed how to develop a rigorous planned approach that will impact on delivery outcomes through effective group dynamics, interface management and good leadership methodologies.

Enjoy the video

and the slides

Almost a week ago, we had our October 2008 PMI Queensland Chapter Meeting. Beside several announcements from the Board and the successful pilot of the Evening Discussion Groups we had Matthew Tati, a Project Manager at Flight Centre, talking about Project Management at Flight Centre.

Especially questions around how IT and the projects engage with the business, how they obtain the resources required as well as some interesting benchmarks around their PMO are provided.

Whatch his interesting presentation here and see the slides below

and the slides

 PMIQ Chapter Meeting - October 2008: Download

As i mentioned  in my keynote at the Project Risk Management conference this year, the world is changing, its becoming more complex and we have to stay on top, as project managers and individuals, to be able to ’survive’ and to be ’successful’ in that environment. 

Paola Antonelli, a MOMA design curator and a presenter at the famous ‘TED - Ideas worth spreading‘ events, held a presentation about “Design and the Elastic Mind” in December 2007 and it just got posted on the Ted.com website. The abstract reads like this:

MOMA design curator Paola Antonelli walks through the groundbreaking show “Design and the Elastic Mind” — full of ideas, products and designs that reflect the multi-tasking, quickly shifting way we think now. 

Watch the video here or go to the ted.com website.

As I recently compiled a presentation for the IQPC Project Risk Management Conference I applied (tried to) some new concepts around the slides to be presented. My former slides all have been bullet point heavy and i was able to cover most of the content in 10 to 15 slides.

I wanted to do slides differently for a long time and just waited for a reason.

So i bought a number of books in the last 2 years, and “PresentationZen” from Garr Reynolds was spot on. In this post though i do not want to look at the whole book I just want to talk about the experience to put a presentation based on the described approach together.

How ever Garr is describes beside others (Handout as PDF) the following concept in his book:

Reduce the text on your slides to an absolute minimum. The best slides may have no text at all.

This may sound insane given the dependency of text slides today, but the best PowerPoint slides will be virtually meaningless with out the narration (that is you). Remember, the slides are suppose to support/supplement the narration of the speaker, not make the speaker superfluous. Yes, it is true that many people often say something like this: “Sorry I missed your presentation, Steve. I hear it was great. Can you just send me your PowerPoint slides?” Well, you could. But if they are good slides, they may be of little use without you.

As a result by having more than 50 slides, you need to find and identify 50 pictures that support a specific message. The picture has to be found, embedded, adjusted, cropped and referred to. All this might take time.

Garr recommends iStockphoto which is a service where you can ‘buy’ pictures to use for that reason, which might become a very expensive exercise if you need to buy 50 pictures. Another option is to use flickr and use the advanced search and narrowing the search to “creative-commons-licensed-content”. Most of the pictures can be used for non commercial approaches.

So I used that approach for my presentation / keynote to be prepared:

• I ended up 3 days in front of Powerpoint (after I put together my story line and the key messages I wanted to get across, so this time is not factored in the 3 days).
• I used 120 slides for a 45 minutes presentation
• after 3 days I couldn’t see Powerpoint nor my computer anymore

Once a month we are having our PMI Queensland Chapter Meeting, at the Irish Club in Brisbane CBD. September 17th at 06pm we started of with a great presentation from Richard Egelstaff,  a practicing IT Project Manager for Thiess-Services Pty Ltd responsible for the development and implementation of enterprise IT systems. Richard was talking about Project Management Eucation in general and he is looking at all the options we might have to upskill ourselves. Questions like

• What is Project Management Education?
• How has it changed over the last decades?
• What is available out there?
• Is it about skill or about comptence?
• What recommendation to give?

will be looked at.How ever some points Richard was missing or at least missing to give an answer to. What kind of Education a full time working Project Manager should undertake without impacting his job. We will cover that within the TJTV series as part of a personal short interview. Richard has done some great research for this presentation and looked at many current options out there, so make sure you take a look.

As always, the slides can be seen below.

 PMIQ Chapter Meeting - September 2008: Download

After being a little disappointed about the website presence of ISASA (see former article), I must admit, i was really impressed about the organised Business Lunch. Never been in the Brisbane Convention Center for such an event (beside unemotional basket ball games and concerts) for that kind of purpose it was fantastic. Great room, large, good sound conditions, wonderfull and gret food that we got served and, nothing to do with the venue, great organisation and an inspiring speaker.

John Thorp (via LinkedIn)has been introduced as 

an internationally sought-after management consultant with 45 years of experience in the information management field and author of “The Information Paradox”, that will discuss the latest international thinking on addressing the governance challenge. John will addresses and advises leaders of some of the world’s largest organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia-Pacific, including Fortune 100 companies.

Bottom Line, he is experienced, skilled, seen a lot of things and wrote book. A good way to start off with.

After the lunch got served and the opportunity to speak to your neighbours John started his inspiring presentation.

Lets talk about the presentation itself and its still (always interested in that):

1. He builds raport with the audience by talking and showing pictures about himself
2. He uses lots of quotes from other leaders
3. He refers to his book (26 final copies were on sale after the show)
4. He used numbers and studies to support his arguments
5. He uses pictures to present
6. How ever, the presentation went into detail and so did the font (got smaller and smaller and less pictures)

John is one of the guys where the presentation is great because of , which is great, the slides are just supportive, which is how it should be done.

Lets talk about the content of this 60 minutes presentation

I will just highlight some his key message that i got of the presentation

1. The value of IT is to deliver optimal benefits based on affordable costs with an acceptable risk over the full life cycle of the investment
2. If you do not take any risk you are not getting anywhere
3. The Evolution from IT went from Automisation of Work via Management of Information to the Transformation of the Business
4. From Run the Business via Change the Business to Change the rules of Business
5. Change is enbale by IT but the BUSINESS must be accountable and responsible 
6. OO + NT = COO (Old Organisation plus New Technology is a Complex Old Organisation
7. “My project is in trouble and i ‘hope’ its getting better …. ‘hope’ is not an option
8. IT Governance is the continually orienting and adjusting and managing an uncertain journey to an uncertain destination
9. Key Governance Questions to be asked (Are we doing the right thing -> Are we doing them right -> Are we getting them done well -> Are we getting the benefits -> start with the first question)
10. Less than 10% of organisations doing checks on benefit realization post project
11. Less than 5% of organisations hold the stakeholders accountable for project benefits
12. Business engagement and accountability are essential

And after that he talked about some details in the ValIT method (http://www.isaca.org/valit/ -  you download the whole framework on that site).

The juice that i got out of it is to understand from his view the role of IT in the organisation and how it has to change from being alligned to the Business Strategy to enable business benefits. IT is the enabler, not the driver and the business needs to be aware that IT and a tool is not the silver bullet to solve a problem. By implementing a CRM solution to understand more of the client will / might have an impact on the organisation as a whole and might even change their business model. So its less about ERP Implmentation in that case its more about organisational change.

John was asked a couple of questions especially around implementing this approach and thought into an organisation and he left out the real answer by talking about, yes, its a long journey and it would take 8 to 10 years for some larger organisation to adapt this approach.

So key more is to understand, are you more successful with doing it top down or bottom up, what is more likely to be sucessful and i guess there are several answers to it.

Bottom line, great event, great presentation, useful thoughts and information and a book that is worthwhile reading (The Information Paradox, by John Ford) that i got a signed copy at the end.

After attending the PMOZ 2008 Conference in Melbourne for two days, I was now able to convert the recorded Video into Flash and find a service provider that is able to host presentations that are longer than 10 minutes (eg. YouTube has a limit of 10 Minutes, even if you have a “Director” or “Guru” account). The Service i am using is Viddler that I will post separately on.
The presentation took place in the 35th floor of the Sofitel Hotel (the venue of the conference) and the actual conference took place in level 2 in the ballroom and other rooms. I am happy that around 40 people attended and made their way up. The room was pretty strange as it was like 25 meters long and 6 meters wide and windows where you had a stunning view across Melbourne.
So, finally here is the video of my presentation:

Please let me know if you have any further feedback how to improve the presentation of the topic (I know that the slides need improvement as they are very much tailored to a business audience that you need to convince that Health Checks are a good thing rather than an audit.)
Below please find the slides that you can download via my profil on slideshare.