"Pulling Your Head Out of Your Budget: Mental Re-tooling for Agile Project Management"

Who: David Christiansen

When: April 22, 2008

Kennedy Hall is building 7 on this map.

Introducing agile project management techniques into a large, historically waterfall organization is not easy. It is not enough to simply change the prevailing practices related to IT project management. In most cases, it involves changing the way project managers, project teams, and executives see the world. It requires a change in values and behaviors that goes beyond daily standups and product backlogs.

David Christiansen started introducing agile project management in his projects in early 2006. He has implemented three major software projects using an agile approach in a waterfall world. As a certified PMP, David found that in order to successfully adopt the agile principles, he had to first change many of the notions and beliefs that his PMI training had instilled in him. This presentation walks through many of the changes David had to make to be a successful agile project manager, some of the painful, and some of them amusing. Every agile practitioner can find valuable lessons in David’s experience that help them more successfully adopt agile project management in their organizations.

For the second half of the meeting, David will show how he uses Microsoft Sharepoint to manage projects.

Speaker Bio

David is a project manager at a Fortune 100 insurance company, where he has spent the last two years introducing agile project management techniques to his very waterfall-centric organization. He is also the managing editor of Sapient Testing, the official newsletter of the Association for Software Testing (www.sapienttesting.com), and the founding editor of Technology Dark Side: A Corporate IT Survival Guide (www.techdarkside.com). He is a hobbyist writer, speaker, and trainer. One of his recent projects was to create a two-day practical workshop on exploratory testing with Mike Kelly.