PMI PDU´s

Recently I´ve got many questions from colleagues asking about what kind of PDU categories exist on PMI, and how can be earned the PDUs in each category.

The information about the categories is in the PMI website, but it is not so easy to find it. 

In the following picture can be seen where the pdf that provides the information about this topic is located. The file is called "PDU Category Caps and Rules".

About how to get PDUs in each category, I will refer to a post written recently by a friend, where he explains many different ways to get easily PDUs. (The post is in spanish)

LINK: How to get PDUs

New Year Propositions

A New Year has arrived, and as in all new years, new propositions come with it!!!

The last year was a busy one where I could not post as much as I wanted, as it was pretty difficult to find time between all my professional and personal activities.

At the end of the year I joined a new company. This company was the number one social network in Spain for several years, beating clearly to Facebook. Now, it is under a transformation plan, moving from a social network to a global virtual operator, and my main task there is to lead all the international projects with the goal of launching as a virtual operator worldwide in an agile mode.

Apart from it, I am one of the members of the Control Systems and Communication
Commision of the Industrial Engineering Association, I am leading a new private club focused on engineering and science, and I keep doing volunteering activities for PMI.

Therefore, I have and I will have many things to post, so I will try my best for getting some time for posting regularly and share experiences with all of you, because, this is one of my new year propositions!!

Let´s make 2015 legendary!!

Talking about mentoring in PMI Madrid

The last week I had the chance to talk in the monthly PMI Madrid meeting about the mentoring program that me, together with other four volunteers, have established for all the PMI Madrid partners.

PMI Madrid monthly meeting

The goal of the presentation was to show to the PMI Madrid partners that the program is available for all of them, acting as mentors or mentees or both, in order to increase the number of participants in the next edition of the program, that will be kicked off the next month of October. For it, I exposed the benefits that a mentoring program provides to the mentors and to the mentees, and a couple of partners who have participated in a previous edition of the program, exposed their personal experience, and the benefits they have achieved going through this mentoring program. 

As a summary of the main benefits for the participants I extract these ones:

Mentors:

• Contribution to the project management profession
• Strenght their leadership skills
• Satisfaction of helping to other colleagues
• Way to get PDUs

Mentees:

• Professional development
• Exposure to new ways of thinking
• Increase their self confidence
• Way to get PDUs

Guide for getting projects back on track (Part 1)

My last assignments have been related to get back on track projects that have been running for several months and they were totally off track from all perspectives. I am going to write a series of posts related to my experience in these assignments, in order to build a guide of recommendations I suggest for getting the projects back on track.

First thing to do when you are assigned to a project that has been running for a while already, even for those ones that are not off-track, is to meet the current PM of that project in order to do a formal handover of the activities.

In that handover meeting I follow a template that is composed of the following sections:

- Project details: In this point of the agenda of the meeting I try to get basic project data like:

• Project name,
• Customer,
• Sponsor,
• Steering group,
• and so on...

- Checklist: The next point in the agenda has as main goal to get detailed information from the following areas:

• Scope,
• Time,
• Cost,
• Quality,
• Human Resources,
• Communication,
• Risks,
• Procurement,
• Customer.

- Additional Comments: As some relevant information of the project may not be covered in the points above, I include in the agenda of the meeting an slot for the PM and for myself to deliver and request additional information.

- Action Points: As during this meeting it may be not possible for the current PM to provide all needed information for the handover, is important to take action points and establish near time deadlines, in order to have all the needed information for managing the project as soon as possible.

Once you have had this meeting, you can have already a good view of why the project is offtrack. Most of the times is because the baseline of the project has not been defined or has not been monitored. You will realize in this meeting if this is the main reason, as you may not get from the PM most of the information you are requesting, or because you see that the documentation that is delivering to you is outdated.

What is next after this meeting??: It will depend on the outcome of it. From my experience, for projects that are offtrack you will not get from the PM most of the information requested in this meeting, and then you will have to create a new baseline starting from the planning phase, while you in parallel try to overcome the most urgent isssues that have already been escalated by the customer.