Community Events

This may sound odd as a topic for Applications Development for Project Managers, but having just volunteered for (and attended) a community event, I feel compelled to remark on it. The event was the 1st SQL Saturday held in South Florida. It was organized by Scott Klein & Herve Rogero & was held at DeVry University (thanks Ed Hill) . I heard of the event through my membership in the Florida .net Users Group. As little as a month ago, there were only 70 registered participants & the hopes were for at least a hundred attendees. Within the next few weeks registration soared to 450+; and pending a final count of attendees, best guess is ~350 attended. This is for a 1st time event here in South Florida! There is obviously a huge pent up demand for focused training on new technology & concepts. (It might be useful to e-mail the participants to find out how they heard of the event in order to get a handle on future event information dissemination channels). My guess is through community newsletters, LinkedIn & word of mouth.

This event had six tracks, one BI, four DBA & one Developer. Everybody (including DBAs, & Developers), needs to be familiar with BI & it was SRO all day. All tracks & session were well attended & even with 4 DBA tracks, many of those were also SRO. (Click on the Schedule or Session images to see a larger version)

The goal was to feature as many different speakers and topics as possible, but space limitations prevented us from accepting every session. I was interested in the Developer Track, but as the number of attendees continued to rise, I found myself spending all that time doing various things in my volunteer role, as opposed to my attendee role. I went up & down the stairs so many times, I’m virtually crippled today (two days after the event). I had forgotten that I had a phone list & a cell phone. It’s OK, I needed the exercise.

We had a problem with the SSIS sessions. The originally scheduled speaker was unable to attend & we didn’t find out until the session was starting. One of the attendees, Jared Kirkpatrick, stepped in & gave a presentation on SQL Server Security. The SSIS sessions were re-scheduled & given by Devin & Brian Knight (yes, that Brian Knight). One thing to remember about communities, is that they are just that, communities, a group of people with something in common, some shared vision or need. I have found that communities are composed of people who are willing to share their time & expertise & that they are a source of help & information in solving many problems & answering many questions.

I am a member of various communities with local chapters, such as the aforementioned Florida.net users group (part of Ineta), & the South Florida Chapter of PMI. I also follow other local communities to get a heads up on events. Some of these are the Gold Coast Users Group (GCUG), & various LinkedIn groups, local, national & international. There are two local SQL groups under the umbrella of Florida .net, the Miramar SQL group & the Palm Beach SQL group. I’m also a member of PASS , MPUG, PMI, PMI-ISSIG, & will soon become a member of the new Agile Community of Practices. I follow several Software Development & Project Management blogs & publications, & probably view on average a webinar a week on new technology & best practices.

The point of all this is that if you do not stay current with new developments in your profession, you will be left behind. The rate of change is accelerating & we all need at the very least a familiarity of what’s out there & how it can benefit us in achieving our objectives, whether they are a new application, better speed, more reliability, or whatever. The contributors to this event, & other local events deserve our thanks & applause. They have provided free training by true & proven experts, it’s up to us to take advantage of it.

The New PMBOK® 4th Edition & Software Applications Development

Last weekend I attended a presentation on the differences between the new PMBOK® 4^th Edition and the previous 3^rd Edition. This presentation was given by Kim Caruthers at Nova Southeastern University in association with the South Florida Chapter of PMI. I had already purchased the new edition in the hopes of keeping current with best practices (an old dog needs constant training to do new tricks). I had read 2 sections, Collect Requirements & Identify Stakeholders, both in conjunction with previous posts to this blog, or for assignments to measure the effectiveness of our current processes in doing these specific things. My last post raved about the Requirements Section, & I was pleased to see that some of the techniques I had discussed in an earlier post on Software Development Stakeholders were now firmly part of the new PMBOK®.

The presentation lasted 4 hours & it was way too short. It could easily have been 8 hours. It became apparent that in 4 hours, we would not be learning the new edition; we would mostly be discussing the format changes. There were a few new acronyms & a ton of retired acronyms. BTW, the processes now all follow the verb noun format. There were new items in the glossary, no new concepts, just new glossary items. I’m going to borrow terms & phrases from both the PMBOK® & from Kim’s 283 page PMBOK® Guide Differences presentation. As an aside, the class had twice the anticipated audience, about half were there because they now had to take the PM Certification test with the new edition, another 40% were there for PDUs, and the rest of us were there for personal education only. The presentation was geared for test takers (even I had to take a pre & post test, results not admissible in a court of law). Good luck to the PM Certificate test takers, I’m sure you’ll do fine.

There is a greatly increased emphasis on interpersonal skills & the realization that PM’s accomplish work through the team & stakeholders. There’s an entire appendix ( Appendix G) covering these topics that speak directly to the qualities a good PM needs to be successful. I follow several blogs dedicated to Project Management or Software Development & this has become a bigger & bigger part of the landscape. I especially recommend Project Shrink to those interested in the people part of Software Project Management. The explicit inclusion of interpersonal skills in the new edition is extremely gratifying. Agile Software Development demands more interpersonal skills & we had better all become more agile & more people oriented.

Collect Requirements is a new process to the book, certainly not a new process to Software Developers (or any other project management field). Failures in this area are one of the major contributors to failed, overdue &/or over budget Software Development projects. Develop Preliminary Project Scope Statement has been removed; evidently either the Project Charter or the results of the Collect Requirements process will suffice. In the course of this the Scope Planning Process has been removed for the same reason. BTW, the book now suggests that the PM have an active role in developing the Project Charter. This is something we have all been doing, but it has now been acknowledged. There’s a new process called Report Performance. We’ve always done that as part of Monitor & Control, but now it’s its own process under Communications. Collect Requirements also references well known facilitated workshop techniques (JAD, QFD, VOC & HOQ). Mind mapping is also explicitly discussed. There are many Mind Mapping software offerings available, some free, some at a varying costs. Some can interface with other PM software ( MS Project for instance). I use Free Mind.

There is an expanded discussion of the relationship between Projects, Programs & Portfolios which bears reading both for organizations which have PMOs & PPMOs & for those who don’t. Those of us who don’t have either offices end up having to do both anyway in order to comply with our ethical responsibilities, & we have to do it without the resources & access to do it properly.

The Business case has become recognized as in input to the development of the Charter. I have always felt that the Business Case was extremely important & that lack of it leads resources being applied to the wrong projects. I’ve been recently soliciting help & feedback on Business Value & have gotten some extremely helpful responses, but that’s another discussion. It all comes back to the keystone of Agile Development, delivering value. This concept now has been translated to Project Management on many levels.

There has been an acknowledgement of the place that both processes & documents (artifacts) have. Processes usually produce Documents, which serve as Inputs to other processes. Some of these documents have been identified & discussed in detail. The Stakeholder Register is one of these. PERT & other risk documents & techniques are also discussed. One of these days, I’ll post an article on PERT in risk management which will change the common view of PERT as a scheduling or cost tool.

All in all, the new PMBOK® is an advance in techniques & concept. It’s more reflective of the Agile Development world & of the importance of people skills. It’s worth the time & effort to get familiar with it.