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Author: Kevin Aguanno

The Need for an Annual Project Management Award

Written by Kevin Aguanno on . Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on The Need for an Annual Project Management Award

Celebrating success and excellence in different disciplines, professions and industries is endemic in today’s award-heavy world.  But some areas are notable for their lack of recognition of individuals’ achievements. One good example is the lack of awards available to celebrate our most successful projects and project managers.

Some countries do have awards but without a high international profile. For example, the Association for Project Management in the UK issues annual awards in thirteen categories including both awards for practitioners and academics. They also have a lifetime achievement award for those giving the most to the profession.

Other countries have yet different award systems, each reflecting their strengths and different areas of focus.  I believe that there is room for a new international awards structure that reflects worldwide project management values.

To start with, I believe that we should have academic awards.  The profession has grown dramatically over the past decade or so, as tens of thousands of students complete degree and non-degree project management training programs at universities, community colleges, and through private training providers.  A number of educational institutions in North America and around the world offer project management certificates or degrees. It should be possible to invite these institutions to nominate their top students each year for an award

A second category of awards would focus on the project managers themselves. An international award recognizing top project managers would help to provide focus for the profession, would identify role models, and would foster a community of top managers..  Awards should be based upon consistent performance across a number of projects, plus giveback to the profession (through conference presentations, writing articles or books, participating in standards development, mentoring, etc.), with a recent focus project being heavily weighted in the mix.

A third category of awards would focus on successful projects across a number of key areas:

  • Public-Private Partnerships – A current focus of many governments where they seek to work more closely with industry to improve the efficiency of public-sector projects. 
  • International Development Projects – This would recognize project managers who have given generously to support those around the world who are less fortunate.
  • Environmental Projects – As we struggle to shift into a more “green economy” through new technologies and process innovations, let’s celebrate these successful projects so that more companies may feel safe taking bold steps implementing change.
  • Technological Innovation – An award to celebrate technological innovations will highlight project management  leadership in this area.
  • Non-Profit Sector Projects – Like so manygroups, project managers spend a lot of time supporting many non-profit groups. This award will highlight the projects that make best use of these volunteer resources to achieve great ends.
  • Resource Sector Projects – This category would reward the most successful projects in the resource sector, including resource extraction (mining, oil and gas), forestry, the fisheries, and agriculture.

Each of these awards could have national finalists/runners up and then an international  winner. 

For the utmost credibility, such awards should not be offered by a for-profit consultancy.  Similarly, as PMI chapters are legally branches of that U.S. organization, and since they each have limited geographic scope, it would not make sense to have them administer these awards.  I think it would be best if these awards were offered by an international non-profit association, possibly a new organization set up solely to administer these awards.

So, now I’ve shared my vision for a new international national project management awards program.  Tell me what you think with your comments at the end of this piece.  By working together, we can build an international awards paradigm that would have broad-based support. 

Kevin Aguanno is a PMI-certified Project Management Professional (PMP), and his competence is certified by IBM as a Certified Executive Project Manager and by the International Project Management Association (IPMA) as a Senior Project Manager (IPMA Level B). He is the author of over one dozen books on PM-related topics. Find out more about agile project management in his free AgilePM Newsletter at www.AgilePM.com.

A Fresh Approach to Project Management Training

Written by Kevin Aguanno on . Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on A Fresh Approach to Project Management Training

I had the pleasure to be a guest lecturer recently for a project management fundamentals course at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. While I’ve lectured in this way many times over the years for many different institutions, I was struck by the unique approach that this course used for teaching the project management basics.

Most project management courses use PMI’s Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge as both a text and a framework for teaching the subject. Classes are often divided along the chapters (knowledge areas) in the PMBoK Guide and students are taught a typical, sequential project management process (a.k.a. “waterfall method”) for implementing the tools and practices described in the book.

What was different about the Trent University teaching model was that they used two main textbooks: the PMBoK Guide (as expected) and a book on agile project management. The professor, Peter Northrop, explained that he wanted to give “a balanced perspective on two prevailing views of project management.” When I dug a bit deeper into this, he noted that in past years, computer science students (the primary audience for this course, although business students can also count the credit) who were taught a waterfall model for software development rarely completed the end-of-year assignments, often getting caught up in the paperwork side of their project rather than completing the deliverables. With the introduction of agile project management training, more projects are now getting completed, though with some noted resistance among those who still want to teach and use a more traditional, waterfall-based model.

Students were correctly taught that the PMBoK Guide describes a menu of processes and tools that one may want to use on a given project. There is no “PMBoK Method” prescribed by PMI; in fact, they don’t yet publish a project management methodology at all. When building their project plans, students are encouraged to select from the practices described in the PMBoK Guide to build sound project management approaches. Being given an understanding of agile project management right from the start (remember that this is a PM fundamentals course) means that students are often choosing iterative and incremental development models, with more of the agile management techniques. They see that these agile management techniques are not in conflict with the PMBoK Guide (in fact, many are described in that book) and they feel confident in adopting the processes and tools that make the most sense for their own projects.

I was amazed to see this teaching approach being implemented (and succeeding) with the students. Agile project management is usually considered to be an intermediate or advanced topic, not something that is taught to beginners until after they have learned the basics. Not that I thought that it wouldn’t work (after all, it is the holy grail of project management teaching, in my opinion) but rather that the approach was so innovative and that it was being pioneered at a university – the last place that I expected to see that kind of project management training innovation.

Giving students the understanding of a range of project management approaches and tools or process options builds more flexible managers who likely will be more able to adapt to various work environments when they are done school and entering the workforce. In addition, they more likely will have the confidence to adapt standard methods to deal with the unique characteristics of their projects. It takes a good understanding of a method to be able to modify it, and most managers don’t have the confidence or the knowledge to do so, resulting in the deployment of the full method on every project. These graduating students will be less likely to fall into that trap.

In my mind, this project management fundamentals course should be considered a model for the redevelopment of many of our existing project management training offerings. Recent studies in Dr. Dobb’s Journal show that agile management techniques are now being used in more than two-thirds of organizations and a healthy percentage of the remainder are considering trying out the agile approaches. Agile management is not a fad; it traces its roots back to the iterative incremental development techniques used for large scale software and systems development projects starting in the 1950s. It is time that mainstream project management training organizations realize this trend towards adopting agile techniques and start teaching them to their students. Heck, even the latest version of the PMBoK Guide finally at least mentions agile. If PMI is finally recognizing the trend, then perhaps there is hope that we will soon have more project managers trained with a broader set of tools, and the confidence to challenge assumptions in the quest to optimize the delivery of their own projects.

Just Say No to Project Management Charlatans

Written by Kevin Aguanno on . Posted in Articles. 9 Comments on Just Say No to Project Management Charlatans

There is an interesting shift underway that has a profound impact for the project management community. Up until the past few years, the project management community has been focused on “basic training” and getting new PMs ready to write the PMP exam. While some industries such as engineering, procurement and construction have an overall higher project management maturity level, the fastest growth over the past couple of decades has been in the information technology industry, where a majority of organizations are small with a low level of PM maturity. PM publications and conferences have been mostly focused on serving these “new” IT PMs with novice (and a small amount of intermediate) training.

What has changed, however, is the emergence of more advanced topics such as critical chain scheduling (based on Eli Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints) and agile management techniques. These advanced topics have captured the imaginations of project managers everywhere, who are frustrated with the all-too-common bureaucratic governance models that are slapped on to our typical projects. People are yearning for better ways of doing things. For most, this means less useless paperwork and needless bureaucracy.

Critical Chain Scheduling is now a hot topic in magazines, on the net, and at conferences, where innovative approaches towards estimating, scheduling, and control have helped many companies reduce their project durations and budgets without sacrificing quality. Early success stories have triggered a massive surge in demand for more information about this subject, creating a shortage of experts that has led to many under-qualified people being promoted as experts.

The growth of interest in agile methods has been even more pronounced than the interest in Critical Chain – at least an order of magnitude greater. Agile methods promise higher quality, lower risk, and better stakeholder relationships, especially in high-change or high-complexity projects. Yet, again, early successes have led to a surge in demand for expertise that was (and for certain specialties still is) in short supply. Too many people with book learning, but no practical experience, have been promoting themselves as experts, which is not helping the innovative ideas and excellent practices that are part of the agile methods.

Even though demand is very strong for information on Agile and Critical Chain, we need to examine carefully the source of our information; else, we risk getting incomplete or inaccurate information that may lead us astray, causing us to believe that the techniques don’t work and shutting us off from an avenue of potential benefit for our projects. Personally, I have seen a few examples of this in recent months. In one case, a large, multinational corporation was undertaking a pilot initiative to test agile methods within their IT organization. The problem was that they hired a consultant who promoted himself as an “agile guru” but who had only implemented agile a few times in small organizations on low-complexity projects. To work smoothly in highly complex organizational environments, you need to layer additional governance structures on top of the standard agile methods. In one recent interview on the dangers of customizing Scrum (the leading agile management methodology), Ken Schwaber, one of the co-founders of Scrum, said that Scrum provides just a simple framework for a single project. To make Scrum work across a range of inter-related projects, or even an organization, requires additional practices to be layered on top of Scrum to address items that are outside of the scope of the Scrum method. To know what needs to be layered on top of a basic agile method, and to add it without unduly reducing the agility of the overall project takes expertise and finesse. These are qualities that need to be learned on the streets, through trial and error, and that you will only find in those with experience. Watch out for the army of newly-certified ScrumMasters who think they are now the experts in the agile methods after taking two to three days of training. They know enough to sound like experts, but may collapse under the pressures of a real, complex project.

The real need is for measures of competence not knowledge. In North America, the PM community is just starting to figure that out. The PMI is introducing its first competency-based certification for program managers (PgMP). The formation of two associations, the American Society for the Advancement of Project Management www.asapm.org and the Project Management Association of Canada www.pmac-ampc.ca are bringing to us the four-level competency-based certification model used around the world by national associations affiliated with the International Project Management Association [www.ipma.ch], the oldest professional association for project managers in the world. The IPMA certification model is not about passing a test (like the PMP) but rather focuses on assessing workplace performance. To get IPMA certified, you must demonstrate (with evidence) repeated, successful performance as a project manager on complex projects.

At one point, employers thought that a PMP was an indication of a superior project manager. Now that PMI has churned out hundreds of thousands of PMPs, employers have come to recognize that the presence of a PMP does not distinguish between poor and excellent PMs; rather, employers are seeking other measures of performance such as the IPMA competency-based certification model, or proprietary PM competency assessment systems developed for in-house use.

We need to demand evidence of competency from those we turn to for advice, whether it is PM basic training, or advanced training in topics like Critical Chain Scheduling and Agile Management. By listening only to those who can clearly show their competence, we will get much better advice and steer clear of the naïve recommendations of some so-called experts. The result will not only be better projects, but also increased trust in our profession.