I’ve been invited by the PMI Agile Community of Practice to present a webinar. It will be held on February 15, 2011 at noon Eastern time and will last one hour. The topic is “The Seven Sins of Project Management.”

Here’s the session description:

Agile approaches to software development promise many advantages: shorter schedules, more productive teams, products that better meet customer expectations, higher quality, and more. In this talk, Mike will explain how agile teams achieve these goals by avoiding the seven deadly sins of project management. Covered will be sins such as gluttony, sloth, lust, opaqueness, and more. Giving in to one of these temptations can result in a failed or canceled project. Along the way you’ll be introduced to key aspects of agile development and hear stories of agile success and failure.

There’s no charge to participate but you do need to be a member of PMI’s Agile Community of Practice. But, hey, that’s a good thing to join anyway. (And I think it’s free, too.) You need to register in advance, which you can do on the PMI website.

The Chinese edition of Succeeding with Agile will be available in about two weeks (end of October). The book was very kindly translated by Luyu Yang, Jingbin Liao, Andrew Lv, and Zhengyun Chen. They used Scrum to work together on the translation in the ScrumCN.com community. The book will be published through Tsinghua University.

Thank you to everyone for making this translation possible.

My three books on agile made this list of “The Top 100 Agile Books” by Jurgen Appelo. He used an objective method of ranking books based on Amazon.com and GoodRead.com quality ratings and popularity. His blog explains the approach. Uncle Bob Martin and I were each fortunate enough to have two books in the top ten.

Just about all the books on the list are worth reading so pick up a few of them if you’re looking for something good to read.

Laurie Williams, a professor at North Carolina State University, recently conducted a survey to find out which principles and practices are used by agile teams. If you read my monthly newsletter, you probably saw the announcement asking for people to participate. She had over 300 responses and released the results today. Among the findings were that these are the most important principles based on the number of respondents rating their importance as “Very High”:

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
4. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
5. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

The survey also asked which agile project management practices were essential for a team to be considered agile. The top five were:

1. Short iterations (30 days or less)
2. Continuous integration
3. “Done” criteria
4. Automated tests are run with each build
5. Automated unit testing

She is doing a follow-up survey about the agile principles. You can take that survey online. I will share the results here when they are available.

Stealing a page from the software development industry, the World Champion New York Yankees have decided to send of their players offshore. Although New York will remain team headquarters, some players will now play their parts of games in the popular offshoring centers of India, Ukraine, and Brazil. The move is expected to save the Yankees $10 million in each of the first three years with no decrease in the number of wins each year.

All games in the 2010 season are scheduled to start at the customary New York start times. Players working in offshore locations have agreed to shift their working hours to accommodate US start times. Alex Rodriguez who will be playing in Kiev commented that “I don’t expect any degradation in performance from starting games at 2 A.M. And if my performance does start to suffer, I suppose there are drugs I can take to keep me awake and performing at my best.”

Shortstop Derek Jeter notes the importance of recent technological advances in making all of this possible: “Just a few years ago, this would have been impossible. But technology has advanced to where playing a game in at the same time on eight or nine continents is possible. Using the Wii, a pitcher in Boston can pitch to me in Bangalore and I can hit it out of the ballpark in Kiev.”

Manager Joe Girardi says he is looking forward to utilizing a “follow-the-sun” approach to games. The days of occasional double-header or extra-innings games going late into the night when played solely in New York are a think of the past. Girardi says that, “We can go to bed at a reasonable hour here in New York after, say, the fifth inning and players in India will finish the game for us,” Girardi says.