Agile Alliance is now PMI Agile Alliance

For me, PMI was on back foot. Yes.

People are excited because Agile Alliance is now "PMI Agile Alliance". But I am not, why?

When the leading sectors like software development, IT, service industries, knowledge works, innovative technologies like LLM, ML, AI etc. are rapidly evolving. Agile was flourishing for managing projects in these sectors and beyond. Agile methods and practices are booming and dominating.?Comparatively, new organisations (compared to PMI, established in 1969) like scrum.org, scrumalliance.org, SAFe, LeSS, Scrum@Scale etc. are having more than millions of members and certifications holders worldwide. Whereas, PMI is having around 750K (+/-) members till date.?

Yes, you can say they sold certifications at cheap (The Agile Community Shat The Bed). But you must admit what they did good is they impacted thousands of projects professionals' mindsets and way of thinking, approach of managing projects. Along with this, they created hundreds of new and amazing approaches, tools, techniques, model, methods, and artifacts. They created real disruption in the project management market where PMI, APMG was leading without any challenge.

Let me repeat, PMI was in back foot in the movement of agile.?Someone might say, the process-based PMBOKs (earlier versions before PMBOK 5th) is not only advocated predictive or traditional approaches, but they also talked about fluid and iterative processes, progressive elaboration, rolling wave planning etc. from a long back. But they did not talk explicitly about Agile/Adaptive ways of working until the fifth edition and then in the Sixth edition they bundled Agile Practice Guide (here, first collaboration happened with PMI and Agile Alliance) with PMBOK.?

PMI was hustling and trying to find out grounds in agile movement. Yes, PMI-ACP was there for sometime, but was not that popular in the market compare to other agile certifications in the market. To make strong ground PMI brought Disciplined Agile (of Scott Ambler and Mark Lines ). But it was already late compare to the market penetration of Scrum, Kanban and enterprise level agile frameworks like SAFe, Scrum@Scale, LeSS, Nexus etc.?The next couple of years, PMI moved strongly to create significant impact in agile landscape with DA. After the exit of the creators of DA from PMI, I am again doubted on the progress of PMI in agile arena. Fingers crossed!?

There seems to exist a clear competition, aggression (in positive sense), conflict among the agile players in the market. PMI also becoming competitive and strong to grab large share in the market. Conflicts and competition create miracles in knowledge works. When you being a global leader, community and key player (Agile Alliance) in agile continuum?joining with PMI, not all, but certainly some competition, conflict, eagerness for doing better, novel things might lost from both the organisations.??

To remain agile, you need to keep yourself lean. Lean, small teams can move faster, innovate, pivot as needed and create large impact and disruption in no time. PMI is already a heavyweight organisation. My fear is, this PMI Agile Alliance with the weight of PMI might loose it focus. Ultimately, the project management professionals might be loser to get some great new things happening. Of course, in opposite to this remarkable things could happen. Time will say what the future holds.