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.

Project Management, a temporary fashion, or a need?

Project management, a temporary fashion or a need..... IS THIS STATEMENT TRUE?

Let´s make some research in order to check if we can consider that project management is a temporary fashion.

One metric that could make us think that project management is a temporary fashion could be the number of persons that belong to a project management organization or have a project management certification. Let´s look at the numbers in PMI, as the biggest project management organization with ones of the most worldwide accepted certifications.

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In the WORLD: (31/01/2012)

• PMI members: 377.589 
• PMP certified: 471.437

In the world: (31/01/2014)

• PMI members: 450.713 
• PMP certified: 603.216

This means a 19% increase of PMI members and 28% increase in the number of PMPs.

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If we check the same metrics for Spain: 

In SPAIN: (31/01/2012)

• PMI members: 2.638
• PMP certified: 2.831

In Spain: (31/01/2014)

• PMI members: 5.270 
• PMP certified: 5.984

We find a 99% increase in the number of PMIs!! and 111% in the number of PMPs!!!

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And if we check the number of members that belong to the PMI Madrid Chapter for the same period:

We see that the the number of members has increased by 66%.

Looking at these figures is clear that something is making the people in Spain to join project management organizations and getting certified. 

But.... which one could be the reasons for this impressive increase??

If we search in Google "more demanded certifications", what it calls my attention first is that most of the links are related to IT certifications, but in order to not to be focused in just one particular area, i check the link that says 15 Top-paying certifications for 2014, for finding out in the 5th position:

•  Project Management Professional (PMP®) - $108,525

On the other hand, checking data at INE, we can see that in Spain we had a 24.44% unemployment rate in March 2012, and 26.07% in December 2013.

And adding another component to the equation, there are companies, like the one I work for, where is mandatory to be PMP certified in order to be recognized as a project manager, what means that there are companies that are moving to a project driven mode as they have seen the competitive advantage that project management brings to the companies. (My company belongs to the IT & Telecom area).

What can we conclude from all these data??:

It´s clear that there is an impressive increase in the number of people joining organizations like PMI and getting certified, but is not possible to know which one is the main reason while not having data like unemployment rate in the project management profession, percentage of companies demanding project management certifications, percentage of companies working on a project driven mode, and so on....

Based on this, I can not say if project management is a temporary fashion...

But I can confirm that project management is a NEED, just for one simple reason: Project Management impacts directly the bottom line of the companies financial statements, and as consequence in the shareholder value.

Project management is everywhere: Two events attended yesterday

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend two different events. In the morning one organized by Oracle titled "How to transform your business with Big Data Analytics", and in the evening one organized by the IE Alumni (Instituto de Empresa Business School) titled "Keys for an effective negotiation".

What seems at a first glance to have both events in common? Reading the titles, you see that one is related to Technology and the another one is related to Human Skills. In the first case, you use the technology for the transformation of your business, and in the second one you enhance your human skills for making business. Therefore, BUSINESS may be what most of the people would say that was common in both events.

But once you attend both events, you find out that there is another common thing in both, and are the PROJECTS, and the project management. Let´s see why, going briefly into the content of both.

Nowadays, the world if full of data. The amount of data is so huge, that we do not have the capacity of processing all and make use of it. With big data technologies, not only you can handle all the data, if not that you can add intelligence on the processing, being able to get answers to questions that we have not formulated before. This area has an impressive future, and it would take many posts to be able to present it. Anyway, as this is a project management blog, I will jump directly in the agenda of the event to the presentation done by Luis Esteban, Chief Data Officer of CaixaBank, "Innovation for customer service".

His presentation was about what is CaixaBank doing with big data analytics for improving their customer´s satisfaction. He is CDO, C-level, and I was impressed by the fact that he was all the time in his speech talking about PROJECTS!. They work in a project driven mode for achieving their business goals. And as it happens everywhere (as far as I know), he mentioned that all transformation projects face resistance in the organization, but they overcome it mainly with these two points:

• Involving the final users in the project
• Having as sponsor of the project the CEO

How many companies around the world have this project orientation???...

Regarding the event organized by the IE, driven by Pilar Galeote (IE professor), the relationship with the projects is inmediate. How many negotiations (internal and external) do you have in every project you lead? Negotiations are in all the life cycle of the project, since the opportunity is detected, till the the deliverables of the project are handed over to the customer.

Briefly, the session was driven by the method case used by most of the business schools, and it was around the negotiation based on principles/interests. This event could take an additional post, therefore i will not expand the matter here.

As can be seen, projects are everywhere, therefore the project management should not be considered a fashion, if not a need, but about this I will write more in my next post, under the initiative promoted by PMideas, where more than 30 bloggers will write about "Project Management, a Fashion or a Need?" on the 24th of April.