I attended a very good webinar the other day with Ankur Nagpal, the CEO of Teachable, which is one of the training platforms that hosts my Agile Project Management Training curriculum. He was talking about how to market training and made a comment something to the effect of:
“We shouldn’t be providing “training courses”; we should be providing “transformation”
He used the example of transforming a caterpillar into a butterfly. He is absolutely right and that is exactly the approach I’ve strived to develop in my Agile Project Management courses for the past year and a half. In fact, the picture I use as a symbol of my new Agile Project Management Academy and my Mastering Agile Project Management course is based on transformation:
It’s not exactly transforming “caterpillars” into “butterflies” but I think that analogy fits pretty well. It’s about transforming project managers (who may have been heavily indoctrinated in a traditional, plan-driven approach to project management that hasn’t changed significantly since the 1950’s and 1960’s) into a much more high impact orientation that is:
- Focused on producing results in addition to simply managing projects
- Based on blending together Agile and traditional plan-driven project management principles and practices in the right proportions to fit any situation rather than force-fitting all projects to a traditional, plan-driven approach
That’s not an easy thing to do for several reasons:
- PMI has at least recognized Agile as a legitimate variation of project management but “Agile” and traditional plan-driven project management are still treated as separate and independent domains of knowledge with little or no integration between the two
- The prevailing thinking among many people in the project management profession is that, by definition, “project management” is defined as managing projects using a traditional, plan-driven approach and anything else isn’t really “project management”
- There also many well-established stereotypes, myths, and misconceptions to overcome. For example, one of them is that there is a binary and mutually-exclusive choice between “Agile” and “Waterfall” and you need to force-fit your projects and business environment to one of those extremes rather than going in the other direction and fitting the methodology (or combination of methodologies) to the project and business environment
There are obviously some big transformations needed in this area to shift people’s thinking:
- We need to see “Agile” and “Waterfall” in a fresh new perspective as complementary approaches rather than competitive
- We also need see “Agile versus Waterfall” from the perspective of a continuous spectrum of approaches from heavily adaptive at one extreme to heavily plan-driven at the other extreme with lots of alternatives in between rather than a binary and mutually-exclusive choice between two extremes
- Project Managers, and the project management profession as a whole, need to take a broader view of what “project management” is that embraces Agile as well as traditional plan-driven project management
- And, Project Managers also need to see “project management” in terms of producing results and not just managing projects and using whatever methodology (or combination of methodologies) is needed to produce the results as effectively and efficiently as possible
I think you will agree that is a very tall order and a daunting challenge but that is exactly the challenge I have taken on in the Agile Project Management curriculum I’ve developed. Check it out here:
Agile Project Management Academy
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