pmicoc.org

Speaker Bio :
Greg Githens, PMP, NPDP

Greg regularly facilitates and coaches strategic initiatives for his clients, and is going to share some of the concepts and practices. He is also the facilitator for the PMI SeminarsWorld offering titled Leading Strategic Initiatives (Program Management).   Greg is the author of numerous books and articles related to project and program management and its role in realizing strategic organizational outcomes. He is a well-known speaker, invited by the Management Roundtable and others to provide expertise. He holds an MBA and is a certified Project Management Professional and a certified New Product Development Professional. Greg last spoke for a Central Ohio chapter meeting in 2008, on the topic of "Leading With Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solutions by Knowing What to Ask" and has been an invited speaker for the Chapter’s Professional Development Day. Greg has delivered 9 PMI Congress Papers, with provocative titles like "A Better Way to Sell PM," "The Toolbox for Faster Projects and Awesome Products," "Rolling Wave Project Planning," "Breakthrough Thinking With Metrics," "Managing Popcorn Priorities," and "Using the Speed Bumps Technique to Foster Organizational Agility."

Abstract :

Fast and Flexible Projects: Only The Agile Survive

Why do people attend this workshop?

1) They want expand their toolbox with useful practices

2) Their organization, or part of their organization, wants to be faster and more flexible in accomplishing its work.

3) They want to better serve their project’s customers

4) Their organization, or someone in their organization, has decided to “go agile.” This usually means that they have read an article or heard a speech about a new way of doing software development. They want to understand what agile is, and how to use it. Some people have heard that agile is a revolt against “traditional” PMI concepts of project management, and want to know what is different.

5) To get a provocative, challenging viewpoint on the future of project, program, and portfolio management.

6) They want to find out what their peers are doing with agile, and they want to hear success and failure stories

The goal of this course is to help you identify and use practices that will make your project and your organization more successful.

We use the phrase “agile for everyone” to mean that historically (before the software development people published an “agile manifesto”) that companies in all industries were using principles and tools to increase speed and foster flexibility. People from all industries are encouraged to attend to share their practices for speeding up projects and creating awesome products. This is NOT a software development course, it is a course for those interested in the discipline of project and program management. There will only be cursory discussion of software techniques (like Scrum, FDD, XP, Lean Software Development) to illustrate how they apply the long-established principles of fast and flexible projects. You hopefully will recognize that agile has more to do with organizational environment and attitude, and is not just a “set of tools and skills”.

Here are some of the practices that you will learn about: Rolling Wave Project Management, The Speed Bumps Technique, The Four Driving Questions of A Radical Innovation, Front Loading Problem Solving With Interface Identification, The Elevator Speech, Tradeoff Analysis, Polarity Mapping, Selling the Benefits of Project Management, The Four Lens of Uncertainty, Inquiry, Time-focused metrics, Flexibility-focused metrics, Interface definition, Time boxing, Litmus test, the best possible schedule, range estimating, accelerating team learning, a better way for status meetings.