Claude Emond is one of the founders and president of Qualiscope Enterprises, a project management consulting, coaching and training firm based in Montreal, Canada. He has degrees in chemical engineering from Canada's Royal Military College (BEng) and Montreal McGill University (MEng), a MBA from Ottawa University, workshop leadership training from Le Centre Quebecois de la PNL, and is a certified PMP. He has over 25 years experience managing major public and private projects. He teaches project risk management in the Schulich School of Business Master certificate in project management and the PMP certification revision class for PMI, Montreal He is one of the authors of the current PMI Standards for Portfolio Management. Claude can be reached at I have been in Europe again, for more than a month now, giving agile project management and portfolio management workshops. And again, this year, I was invited to give a couple of conferences about project management issues.
The Best Project Managers are Emotion-driven Leaders
A short while ago, Charles J. Pellerin, the author of How NASA Builds Teams: Mission Critical Soft Skills for Scientists, Engineers, and Project Teams, came to Montreal to lead a one-day workshop based on his book. This event was organised with the sponsorship of the PMI-Montreal chapter.
The 10 Key Project Management Success Factors... Minus Nine
WOW! So many people coming to my blog this month! Looking for the elusive recipe, aren't you? I'll give it to you, but before, let me settle scores with 'Listmania', a type of illness that prevents project managers and other stakeholders from thinking straight.
"Why Management" - The Ultimate Knowledge Area
Three years ago, one of my master degree students at the Lyon CESI, France, wrote a very special memoir for his thesis: the document was structured like a chapter of the PMBoK®, with nice and tidy "inputs-tools and techniques-outputs" tables. He had written about what he considered was a missing knowledge area in the PMI® project management model, "Change Management": all that has to be done to prepare the end users of the deliverables to deliver their own part of the deal, the anticipated benefits. He was challenging what is now a paradigm for many well-intentioned project management folks. How could he question the "nine knowledge areas" fabric of the PMBoK®? The thesis evaluation committee that processed his memoir flunked him! It was as if he was questioning Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, right? So, on that subject, I invite everyone to read Stephen Covey's book: "The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness 1.
Project Portfolio Management Goes Agile
I have co-led the development team responsible for the writing of the first edition of PMI's "The Standard for Portfolio Management", first published in 2006. Its second edition was published in December 2008. The standard, as most standards on processes, explains how the process works (or should work). It does not explain how to put it together and implement it. So you have to look somewhere else for that.