PMI’s Agile Future: A Presentation by Mike Griffiths

2017 marks an important year for embracing agile approaches by the Project Management Institute. What is in store for PMI’s Agile Future?

I will be presenting about “PMI’s Agile Future,” in Rome, May 1-3 at the 2017 PMI® EMEA Congress. 2017 marks an important year for embracing agile approaches by the Project Management Institute. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) — Sixth Edition, is set to be released in Q3 will have agile accommodation guidance for each of its Knowledge Areas and an Agile Appendix. I wrote these sections with Jesse Fewell and hope they enable practitioners to see how techniques can be tailored for agile environments.Synchronized for release with A Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) —Sixth Edition, is the new Agile Practice Guide. A collaboration between the Agile Alliance and the PMI® to create a guide for project practitioners working in the “messy middle-ground “of agile teams and plan-driven environments.

I am chair of the author team for this book and just returned from our final meeting to edit the first draft of the guide. We had a huge number of comments from our SME reviewers. Some agile enthusiasts believed it was too lenient to tolerate hybrid approaches as a temporary stepping-stone to fully agile approaches. Some plan-driven enthusiasts believe it was too dismissive of plan-driven approaches to be endorsed by the Project Management Institute.

I think if we can equally upset “enthusiasts” at both ends of the agile and plan-driven scale, we have probably found the sweet spot for pragmatic practitioners looking to navigate the very real in-between world we often occupy.

In Q4 2017, the new PMI Guide to Business Analysis and Standard for Business Analysis will be published together as one document entitled, The PMI Guide to Business Analysis, similarly with agile coverage. I am grateful to Joy Beatty, chair of the BA Standard and Cyndi Dionisio, chair of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) — Sixth Edition for the support they provided at the Agile Practice Guide – Development Workshop we ran at the PMI® Global Congress in San Diego last September.

My “PMI’s Agile Future” presentation for Rome is not just a list of PMI® agile products. Instead I will be telling the story of how people have managed uncertainty and complexity through history. I hope to dispel some myths around phase-gates, PERT (Program Evaluation Review Technique), Gantt charts and waterfall life-cycles and introduce some unsung heroes of adaptive planning. Then, to stay on track, I will introduce PMI®’s agile developments and link them to the future trends indicating the importance of being able to manage uncertainty and complexity.

I am really looking forward to the event and particularly enjoy talking to people afterwards. Please bring your questions and I will see you there.

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