I attended the PMI Mass Bay Chapter meeting last night.  There was a sold out audience of over 200 people for the event, most likely because there you could earn 2 PDUs for attending.  There were two speakers discussing the topic of SCRUM, a form of Agile development.  Both speakers gave an overview of the subject and took questions. 

I sensed a certain level of skepticism bordering on hostility towards the speakers.  I think it is somewhat natural because as project managers we are often trained in traditional style project management and are told that this is the tried and true way of ensuring our projects are successful.  The speakers throw all this out the window and tell us that traditional project management only works for a small subset of projects. 

It is difficult to sit through this and not feel doomed.  While you might remain skeptical that SCRUM is the answer, you find yourself acknowledging all of the typical problems that the speakers bring up of many projects today, mainly that the projects have very dynamic requirements and that there are fewer dollars and resources available to execute the projects.  At the moment I am intrigued enough to want to know more and can see that SCRUM could be used to resolve some of the problems with traditional project management.