It is a pleasure to announce that I am now PMI certified PMP

How I did it:

1. My planning started about 8 months back.

2. First of all, I started with PMBOK and two other books (Rita and Kim) a few months back and did a quick run-through of each book (cover-to-cover) .

3. I have been listening to the audio CD of Rita everyday for past 3 months while traveling to office and back. This is about 2hrs a day.

4. My determination, I waited for PMFasTrac class by Upendra Giri for 2 months before enrolling. You all would agree that he is good, however I am sure that he is the best trainer in Delhi NCR region.

5. I spent about 150 hours sincerely preparing for this exam after our workshop ended in July.

6. In my opinion, PMBOK is sufficient to pass the exam. However, understanding of each topic is a must.

7. I did not spend time on memorizing the inputs, tools techniques and outputs of each process, rather I tried to understand them. This approach I think helped me in handling the tricky and indirect questions.

My inspiration: I have been and still am actively implementing agile methodology in various project. PMP is a industry recognized certification for traditional managers, I am a technical manager (traditional as I started) who wants to understand and practice good things of both the worlds.

I am more than willing to help those who wish to take the exam. I am willing to spend time to teach the concepts, discuss questions/processes and

guide on how best to utilize the little time in hand we get after official and personal commitments. You may call me at 9891777781 or email me at mail2smehra@gmail.com.

Agile requires full-team collaboration, so where do the project managers go...

I started off with writing the “Bad ScrumMaster’s guide to good practices”, it turned into the “Why agile fail” and it then turned into this blog about what happened (or should happen) to traditional project managers.

Agile adoption is on the rise and we all appreciate it. Clients love it cause they get better value for their money. Teams like it cause they do not have to work long hours or on weekend, also they get real satisfaction for the efforts they put into the project. But nobody cared what happened to the plan-execute-control type managers, they became “Bad ScrumMaster” who contribute to the reason of why agile project fail. Most ScrumMaster have a history of being 'plan alone, command to execute and control' project managers or a "decision taking" technical lead

Lets face it, there is no role for project managers in agile teams. It’s the need of the hour to train our traditional project managers (and leads) to turn them into ScrumMasters who can positively contribute to the project and the project team. A few points for traditional project managers to start with:

1. Bring the team into the planning room. Yes, the team can contribute to iteration plan, task estimation, deliverables and task assignments.

2. Be patient with the team. They need your time and support for agile success.

3. Team learns something new everyday, let them take decisions and change them as necessary, this is what makes them agile.

4. Be open to accepting bad news. Embrace truth, it will motivate team to provide “real” status to project’s stakeholders.

5. Good news, now you don’t have any backlog to follow-up the team for. Let go of that scope statement, it is product owner’s task to prioritize features they need in the product.

6. When you don’t have work, identify and remove obstacles for the team (with teams inputs and discussion on solution).

7. Last but not the least, constantly inspect and adapt to the environment to support the teams.

Note: The above points will help project managers even on non-agile projects.