ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● PETER SADDINGTON
NICK WALKER: Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers. Every couple of weeks we get a chance to meet with you and have a conversation about what matters to you as a professional project manager. We’ll cover topics such as project management certification, doing the job of project management, and we’ll pick the brains of some of the leaders in the industry and also hear your stories.
I’m your host, Nick Walker. And beside me are our resident experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates. They’re the guys who’ve been there, done that, and not only lived to tell about it, but are anxious to pass on their knowledge to you. All right. Here we are again, guys.
ANDY CROWE: How are you, Nick?
NICK WALKER: Great. Doing well. I know you’re a little under the weather.
ANDY CROWE: I am. I picked up a little bit of a winter cold here. And so no fun, right before a big milestone birthday and going out West for a ski trip. So not as much fun looking forward to that.
BILL YATES: What birthday is that, Mr. Crowe?
ANDY CROWE: It’s a big milestone.
BILL YATES: Does it have a zero, a zero in it?
ANDY CROWE: It does have a zero in it, and we’ll leave our listeners to do the detective work here.
BILL YATES: Hey, no matter how much I mock you – this is Bill. No matter how much I mock you, you’re still younger than me. At all times.
ANDY CROWE: That’s true. That’s true. Just, yeah, a little bit younger.
NICK WALKER: And I think both of you are younger than me by a good bit. So we’ll just pause it right there. Okay. Well, let’s talk a little bit because I’m going to have to admit my ignorance here today; all right? I have to admit that, when you talk, you talk as if you’ve invented your own language sometimes. I hear you talking about scrum, burn-up charts, kanban boards, iterations, grooming, product backlogs. This is Agile talk, I understand. It seems that Agile, though, has its own vocabulary. Okay, it may be Greek to me. But may I assume that these are terms that a traditional project manager might understand?
ANDY CROWE: I think, Nick, that you could manage projects your whole career and not know these terms, not encounter a lot of these terms. And some of it depends on where you manage, the organizational culture. But Agile does have its own vocabulary, and it is its own set of practices. They’re really a lot different than traditional project management.
BILL YATES: That’s true. And what we’re seeing more and more are organizations that are bleeding Waterfall and Agile. They’ll have teams that are using a Waterfall approach, a methodology to managing those projects, and then other teams that are using Agile approaches. Sometimes there’s a bit of conflict between the teams. Maybe team members want to be on one methodology and not the other. So I think more and more people are, even if they come from a pure Waterfall or traditional project management side, they’re going to hear more of these terms and probably be pulled in and find value in some of these approaches.
ANDY CROWE: And you know, Bill, we might as well explain. Somebody out there may not even know, they may be doing Waterfall project management and not even know why it’s called Waterfall project management.
NICK WALKER: And thank you for voicing my very question. Okay. Just a quick explanation of Waterfall.
ANDY CROWE: Sure. So Waterfall, also called SDLC, Waterfall is called that because the activities literally cascade. You plan. That cascades into execution. That falls down into monitor and control. And then sometimes it’ll loop back up, and you’ll go through that, several iterations in that. But Agile, one of the terms you threw out at the beginning was “scrum.” And that term is taken from rugby. So a scrum is where a bunch of people get together and basically make something happen.
