Agility Happens!

... how's that for a bumper sticker? All kidding aside, my friend and colleague Karen White pinged me the other day to tell me to visit the CEO's blog on the PMI website (it's in our blogroll - check it out). As the author of the 2008 CBP book Agile Project Management, Karen was excited to see that the top echelon of PMI was beginning to "get" the transformative possibilities of agile methods. Says Karen: "IT IS HAPPENING!" - and she's not the type to play fast and loose with exclamation points. Among other things, PMI CEO Balestero quoted an Agile guru as saying that the real impact of Agile methods was:

...driving such values as respect for everyone's opinion and contribution to the project team, consistent and shared vigilance to risk, and more. He felt that it was developed not only to develop software faster and more effectively, but to provide a new culture of work, and new leadership values and principles."

This is what excited Karen, and it hits me where I live, too. After years of writing from the fringe of project management (both fringes, actually--the one that says project management is a transformational tool for organizational change; and the one that says project management helps people feel engagement in work and enjoy their worklives more fully) - it's gratifying that the inner circle of the profession can sense the important change that's coming over the discipline.

Yes, project management is about control - about restoring order to the chaos. But it's more than that; that's  why it has been able to energize and compel so many people for so long. Newbies to the profession often remark on how passionate people can get about PM. CBP research has shown that merely implementing a basic methodology serves to improve employee morale.

Where order meets agility, work becomes exciting and things start to pop. The rapid spread of agile project management is just the firestarter our economy needs.