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It was a difficult week: My work team is being dispersed after having completed its second project and I finally took a hard look at the calendar and realized there are only three weeks left to this month. If I truly plan on passing the PMP exam, study is the name of the game. Combined, these events/realizations were topped by a hard drive crap-out two nights ago that mean I’m down to my back-up computing plan, with no access to InDesign to work on print layouts even if I had the time. Plus, now I need to make time to fix my home computer to see what old archives I’ve lost in that hardware failure.

It didn’t help either that it rained most of the week, so we missed one night of walking entirely, and then there were three nights of squeezing in short walks through the mizzle. We nonetheless managed 11.7 miles over the course of the week… with 3 miles coming Friday and 4.3 Saturday.

I’ve been tired and cranky, and really glad we don’t have much of a social calendar. Though today we did go to watch a niece dance in a junior production of Peter and the Wolf. At 7.5 years old, she made an adorable, graceful little bird… even if attending did break our streak of stay-at-home Sundays. It also reminded me one more time of a Russian rhyme I learned at about her age in Moscow, too, so enjoyed making her eyes big by repeating it to a new audience.

Then a colleague forwarded me an article about how terrible, awful, very bad, and must-be-killed Agile Scrum is… Given that my team was successful enough to reach close-out points for not one but TWO clients following this methodology… I call BUNK. From my reading, this guy has experienced not only poor team cohesion but also the flip-side evil of micro-management and is blaming those on the project management tool du jour for software development. I say they’re a failure of management rather than a failure of the Agile methodology. Agile intentionally empowers the team to make decisions on what it’s capable of accomplishing and builds in daily self-testing to ensure technical debt does not build up. But those things can only happen when the product owner is crystal clear on what he/she wants, and management stays out of the way of a team that is heads-down in the trenches of productive work.

Of course… I’m not getting to done by myself these days, either. I’m watching gifs explain hold-over expressions (and may need to figure out a time to blow off some steam!), reading about more oopsart discoveries (oh, the plotbunnies!), or pondering thought-provoking quotes. Somehow those are necessary when dealing with practice exam questions like:

Your organization has decided to adopt prototyping for requirements development. The biggest advantage of prototyping is that:

	the client can continue to make changes as long as they so desire, until a perfect outcome is achieved
	the prototype is simply a smaller version of the final deliverable and becomes a critical input
	prototypes allow the customer to see what they don’t like and what they like before requirements are finalized
	some cycles of the process are free, allowing the customer to iteratively develop what they want

How is it I feel like I’ve been infected with the stupid bug after studying…?

(And how is it that this particular question somehow echoes the anti-Agile screed my colleague forwarded?)

Given this track record… I suspect this month is a loss for further fiction words on my stories while I try to ensure I have enough PMI-speak hammered into my brain to pass the certification exam. I will continue to check in weekly, but suggest you visit my ROW80 buddies to see real progress being documented.