As I explained in PMI EMEA 2018 Congress in Berlin (arrival and Day 1)  the venue and my whereabouts in Berlin, I may for this one start with the networking bit and the related pics before I jump into the Day 2 and 3 sessions. You will see below some of the usual suspects, presenters, bloggers and other friends!

These folks are fantastic and are also a source of inspiration to make PMing a great job (profession) and share their practitioner experience, thanks to all!

Now time to go through our first session on Tuesday. I must admit, really high expectations at my end for this… Visit of the most popular airport… Airport Berlin Brandenburg! Under construction since 2006, the Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER) was designed to serve 27 million passengers and intended to open November 2011.  I could attend a unique off-site learning session where we will begin with a short presentation on the strategic planning efforts followed by a walking tour of airport.

Let’s start with the pics of the tour before getting into the “meat”:

Clearly amazing visit of a “ghost” airport… you just wonder how this can happen… In reality it is simple… Gouvernance! Gouvernance! Gouvernance! and stakeholders’ management.

They had, as Thomas explained, Master plans, scenarios, stakeholders’ maps… and all the rest of it but obviously no Decision Executive to act as a referee and decision point! Of course all politics and shared accountability…

Let’s hope for the best but I did not feel lots of confidence from the folks there! Nevertheless a cool session with great on-site lessons learned and good sharing.

Dude, where’s my control? Transitioning from a Project Manager to
Scrum Master from Dude, Emily Luijbregts, Project Manager: Em The PM! Just the title is an invitation to travel…

Emily is one of my best surprises in the congress…

She is fun and entertaining speaker, that’s a fact but she also has content and experience to share… and hell she tweets!!!

The purpose of the session was to review the issues that project managers find when transitioning to scrum master and identify the strategies that you can implement in your own projects to resolve issues that you face. She delivered with flying colours!

Having had a leukemia, I am well acquainted with the Kübler-Ross curve  and this is the first time i see someone applying this specific change to the curve and well done, it makes sense and it was well explained. I enjoyed the session and got a nice experience out of it.

Kanban is often used at the team/project level, but the fact that Kanban scales to the portfolio/strategic level is still a well-kept secret. This presentation intended to reveal this secret, and explain how you can lead your organisation step by step towards higher agile maturity. Kanban’s six maturity levels have been explained, and some practical advice have been delivered using real-life examples on how you can climb the maturity ladder and maximise the benefits of your Kanban implementation.

In order to achieve this, Annette Vendelbo, Director, Xvoto took us through Improve organizational flow and performance by climbing Kanban’s maturity ladder…

You can almost read me falling asleep here just by talking about this topic…

Annette is for sure a great SME with lots of experience but she lacks in getting the audience attracted enough to get into the session content. Honestly the introduction to the topic was great then we moved to the smaller details of Kanban and most of us lost the plot even being LEAN Practitioner.

The last session worth talking about was Empowering Organisational Agility with Enterprise Architecture by Mustafa DULGERLER, Takaful Emarat. Sounds really IT driven and guess what… it was 🙂

The purpose of the session was to prepare theoretical and technical frameworks for implementing agility in organisations/projects and explain how different architecture layers help organisations become more modular and responsive to change.

Mustafa wanted the audience to know what is EA and have a idea if you need an EA function, how EA can help organization to make lean, agile, forward thinking at high level and how different layers of EA frameworks can help to increase agility of the organization.

I would say he achieved this nicely but in my case he was really pushing an open door as I already worked with my teams to get the TOGAF Foundation certification to enable sharing the right vocabulary and concepts with our architect colleagues.

I also really appreciated the following statement: “Agility is the ability of an organization to renew itself, adapt, change quickly, and succeed in a rapidly changing, ambiguous, turbulent environment. Agility is not incompatible with stability—quite the contrary. Agility requires stability for most companies.”