I have been in Warsaw yesterday to meet with Dave Prior, chair of the PMI‘s IT&Telecom SIG who was there attending PMI’s Polish Chapter annual conference. We had a very interesting discussion on agile, project management and… Banana Scrum, most of which was videotaped by Dave and will be made available as a part of IT&Telecom SIG videocast.

This is part of Scrum practitioners and traditional IT PMs trying to come closer together. This will be a hard effort, because of cultural divide (which we discussed too) but it will be definitely worth it and traditional PMs are very attracted to agile. When it comes to getting work done knowing other methods can’t hurt.

Dave, it turned out, is also a huge fan of our humble Banana Scrum tool. It was really cool to meet someone who likes and uses what we have built. Gave me another incentive to make sure our fall hiring campaign will allow us to get more resources to work on the tool. I’d like to finally add a few bigger features to Banana that have been waiting on the backlog for weeks now. It would be good to have something for Christmas for our users.

For those of you unfamiliar with PMI SIGs a few words of explanation. PMI is the most known organization of project managers (yes, those dreadful guys with Gantt charts, shamanic metrics and ugly waterfalls), inside of it there are Special Interest Groups – groups that focus on a certain aspect of project management or projects in general. IT&Telecom SIG is the group that is most interested in agile – they know best how miserably waterfall’s record in software development has been.


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