The PMI Founders

If you were at PMI’s Global Congress North America in the autumn you would have had the chance to meet the PMI Founders in person at a breakfast meeting one day during the conference.  They were very interesting people, and it’s amazing that something that started off so randomly – with little investment or appreciation of what it would become – has grown into the organisation we have now, 40 years on.  If you weren’t able to get to the Congress, you can hear what the Founders have to say about setting up PMI on this video.

4 Tips for Working with a Virtual Team

A virtual team is one where not all the team members are in the same place.  This could be across several buildings in the same town, or across several timezones.  The most extreme examples would be a ‘follow the sun’ type team, with team members in Australia, the US and Europe/Middle East/Africa.  In this team example, you will find it difficult to get all the team members together as someone will be going to bed just as someone else is getting into the office!  However, you can successfully manage virtual teams.  Here are some tips.

1.   Have a project vision

Discuss the project vision – that is, the goal, objectives, end state – with the team at the beginning of the project.  This is so that everyone understands what it is that they are aiming to achieve, and can see how their part in the project contributes to the overall end game.  This is a really key point: it is a huge benefit to a team to have a common goal, and having everyone pull in the same direction should not be underestimated as a great way to keep the project on track.  Every time someone new joins the team, or if the project vision changes for any reason, have the discussion again to be sure that you are all still aligned.  This is as true for a collacted team as for a virtual team.

2.   Recognise individual differences

Not everyone communicates in the same way.  And in a virtual team, you can guarantee that most of your communication will be in writing – email, fax, documents, IM and so on.  Understand that people are different. Who is not so good in the mornings?  Who doesn’t have English as their first language?  Also take these points into consideration on conference calls, where you can’t see the body language of your colleagues.  As the project manager, make sure that on a call you encourage participation from everyone.

3.   Think about your motivational strategies

How are you going to keep this team together and on track?  People partake in projects for various reasons, most commonly because they think it will be good for their career, or because they didn’t have a choice.  Regardless, you need to consider how you are going to ensure that everyone gets the motivation they require to keep plodding on.  Consider especially those people who find it hard to work in a virtual environment – in Myers-Briggs Type Indicator terms, these people probably have type ‘E’ in their profiles.  If you gain your motivation and energy from being around others, a virtual environment is going to rob you of that contact with your team, so you should work out how else to bring that feeling into your day job to ensure your motivation doesn’t flag.  Talk to your team about how they are motivated – together and individually – to establish how best you can make the virtual environment work for them.

4.   Communicate effectively

This sounds obvious, doesn’t it?  It should do.  Communication across a virtual team is different to in a collacted team.  You can’t just all up and go out for lunch, or sit in a meeting room for two hours thrashing out the finer points of your project requirements document.  Think about the different communication tools that you use, and work out how best to adopt new ones to manage your non-collacted team.  And review constantly:  try something and if it doesn’t work, change it.  For example, pick the best time for your weekly project progress calls, but if it doesn’t seem like the best time for everyone after a couple of weeks, open it up to the team and ask them to suggest a better arrangement. Then act on it!

Tomorrow I will look at three more tips for managing virtual teams successfully.

These tips are based on my notes from a presentation by Dr Ginger Levin, PMP, PgMP at the PMI Global Congress North America in October 2009, with some of my own thoughts thrown in.

Sunday at PMI Congress North America

PMI Congress North America kicked off properly yesterday in Orlando, with the Sunday morning breakfast panel being a discussion of the history of PMI from the PMI Founders. It’s 40 years since they got together over dinner and came up with the idea for PMI, so it was interesting to hear how they feel it has evolved over time.

From there people went straight into the first Sunday session, and I was presenting on why project managers should care about social media. The room was full, with a couple of people standing at the back, and we had members of the PMI New Media Council discussing a variety of online tools to help project managers do their jobs more effectively. Some interesting questions were asked, including concerns about security of corporate data online in the cloud. It’s an issue for each company to weigh up, and while there are secure solutions with internal hosting options, essentially it is your decision on how best to implement social media and Web 2.0 tools to best meet your needs – whatever risk profile your company might have. You can see a summary of our presentation on the PM Voices blog.

Ricardo Viana Vargas, the outgoing Chair of the PMI Directors, opened the afternoon’s plenary session. He talked about the challenges we face today, namely a global economy in recession and the trillions invested in economic stimulus, allocated by governments without a mature project management approach to support it. He said that this has created an environment where there is an urgent need for good, high-performing project managers and project management. He added that it was possible to get away with poor project management practice when the time and money are available – but that isn’t the case today.

The big event of yesterday was the keynote presentation from T. Boone Pickens, founder and chairman of BP Capital Management and author of The First Billion is the Hardest. He spoke about the challenges facing the US due to their dependence on imported oil. Green projects have become a focus area in recent years, and project managers have a role to play in delivering sustainable futures. Monday’s breakfast panel will also be on the topic of global sustainability.

After the keynote speech, the exhibition halls opened. The exhibitors have been working late getting their booths ready, so they were prepared for the onslaught of people descending into the Florida Exhibit Halls for dinner and a look around the stalls. The ice cream stations were excellent: with cream and other ingredients being frozen in front of us with liquid nitrogen: instant ice cream! The halls are packed with vendors and education providers, and, as last year, the book stall takes up a large floor space.

The PMI’s latest book, Project Management Circa 2025, was also launched yesterday evening at the evening reception, so the book stand was busy with people buying copies, entering the prize draw and hanging around to meet the editors – David Cleland, PhD, and Bopaya Bidanda, PhD – and authors and have their books signed.

Watch a video of the day’s events at A Girl’s Guide to Project Management.

Live from the PMI Global Congress!

I’m here in Orlando, Florida for the PMI Global Congress North America at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Centre.

Yesterday was the first day of Congress, and it’s the 40^th birthday of PMI, so everyone is treating it as a very special occasion. The main events were the Global Accreditation Centre Academic Forum (which looked at innovations in project management education), annual meetings for each of the Virtual Communities and the final Leadership events for those members who are part of chapters or committees – the Leadership conference has been running for a couple of days already, and has now wound up. The biggest event of the day was the awards ceremony and reception.

The awards ceremony took place in the massive Osceola ballroom, and the idea was for us to “honour the best of the best in project management”. Heathrow Airport Terminal 1 was up for Project of the Year and as a London girl I was crossing my fingers for that one! Unfortunately it didn’t win, and if you’ve been following the Congress on Twitter using the hashtag #pminac you will have seen the winner being announced in real time: it was Fluor Enterprises for their Newmont TS Power Plant project – building a power plant in an inhospitable bit of Nevada, so congratulations to them.

Cirque Odyssey performed at the awards, which was brilliant, and broke up the ceremony a bit. There were other awards given out, on top of the Project of the Year. The award winners announced tonight were:

• Distinguished Project Award: Freescale Semiconductor Inc for their final manufacturing organisation IT & Manufacturing partnership; also awarded to PMI Baltimore Chapter for their work with volunteers
• PMI Community Advancement Through Project Management Award — Individual Category: Tim Mattimoe for his work in Africa
  PMI Eric Jenett Project Management Excellence Award: Upendra Giri for cementing project management practices in India
  PMI Research Achievement Award: Jeffrey Pinto
• PMI David I. Cleland Project Management Literature Award: Kathleen Hass for her book Managing Complex Projects: a new model
• PMI Continuing Professional Education Provider of the Year Awards: Cadence Management Corporation for their master course in the multi-disciplinary approach of planning and implementing projects; and to IBM for their in-house work on their internal project management curriculum
• PMI Continuing Professional Education Product of the Year Award: Alpha Consultoria for their seminar on effective project management; and to Euro Bank SA for their ‘Mayday, Mayday’ workshop

On top of this, there were eight people receiving the PMI Distinguished Contribution Award
and seven new Fellows elected to the Institute. There were also awards for the PMI Components and the PMI Educational Foundation.  You can read some of the reactions of the award winners on the Voices of Project Management blog here.

After the awards were announced, PMI had laid on drinks and food – very nice dim sum!

You can see a video diary of the day’s events on A Girl’s Guide to Project Management here, and Jesse Fewell has also written about the day, with some photos.