I’m feeling guilty for being a little late on this post.  Went to a class last week and I’m getting ready to go on vacation.  Hang in there with me during June as I will be travelling.

I took a great class on being a Scrum Product Owner from SolutionsIQ in Redmond last week.  I want to share my class experience because it provided a great example of how agile is important to project managers who want to find the other side of risk.  Agile structures your work so you are constantly challenging uncertainty to drive out opportunities.

The class content was great, the instructors were engaging and knowledgeable, and the class was run in a way that allowed students to learn from one another.  At the end of the class, I was happy with what I learned.  But, I paged through my class notebook and saw lots of pages we didn’t cover.  They all looked like really interesting ideas.  Was the class a success from a project management perspective?  This is the project manager’s dilemma with agile.  How do we commit to scope, schedule, and budget to meet our client’s expectations?  Let’s look closer.

The class was run as an “agile” class.  We used the agile Scrum process to understand and decide on what we wanted to learn within the curriculum; and how we learned it.

Time and cost were fixed constraints.  We finished on time and the class cost exactly what it was supposed to cost.  We got a book of slides and articles at the start of class – the potential scope, but we didn’t cover all of them.  But, everything in the book seemed important.  Shouldn’t I expect everything in the curriculum to be covered?  Would we be successful if we didn’t cover all the slides made available?   How much scope we could complete within fixed time and budget constraints was an uncertainty.  Sound familiar?  Continue reading →