I had a project manager reach out to me last week; we’ll call him Jim. He was wanting some career advice because he felt stuck. Jim likes what he does, but in his job search, employers were wanting agile experience. He was feeling quite down and a little lost.
Reminds me of my wake-up moment, sitting in a PMI chapter meeting listening to a speaker, Dimitri Ponomareff from Kanban Zone (now a good friend and business partner) talk about agile. Lightbulbs immediately went off in my head, and that epiphany hit me as to why my projects were being delivered on-time, within scope and under budget, yet still failing to delight the customer. It was because we forgot to focus on value delivered and speed of that delivery. We were so nervously caught up in managing the iron triangle, the triple constraint, that we lost sight of the whole purpose of the project: to deliver something amazing that the customer could use quickly to forward their goals. With empathy, I told my PM friend, Jim, that unless he was willing to step out in courage towards agility, I could not be sure that things would get better for him.
Today’s fast-paced, market-driven demands in this crazy and shifting digital information age has pushed agile delivery mechanisms to the forefront as not just another alternative, but as a means of survival for many organizations. After listening to Dimitri that night some ten years ago, I immediately shifted gears, took some classes, retooled my resume, and jumped into the deep end of the clear blue waters of agile. It was a true inject of life back into a dying career. Since then, I have helped many people retool and retrain to successfully enter a career coaching and mentoring others in lean-agile practices. It’s people like Jim that keep me excited to share my thoughts around where agility is at and where I believe it is going.
We are just 4-6 weeks out from launching my book, Hummingbird Agile. This book will describe a fresh and frameless approach to agile delivery. It’s not an academic reference guide for the bookshelf, but a true left-to-right, end-to-end compelling read, filled with fun anecdotes and real-world stories and experiences that connect the dots as to why companies are struggling to see the value and benefit of agile-driven solutions. Hummingbird Agile is ultra lean, and yet scalable to any size organization. Hummingbird is the next wave of agility; a second generation and true alternative to Scrum and SAFe. I’m here to help people like Jim, and offer solutions that give you – the leader, the developer, the coach, the product expert – choices so you can make an informed decision on what might be the best agility approach for your organization. You deserve that option to not just pick something new, but something that really works and helps your company move past surviving and into thriving amongst this fierce competitive world of business. #hbagile #business #agile #lean #kanban #scrum #pm
