PMO Chemistry: How to Be a Catalyst
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
This article wouldn’t be possible without the dynamic duo of Dr. Woodard and Mr. Hattersley. Who are they? My two English O-level chemistry teachers in the 1980s. (That’s a bit of a different start, right? Getting to PMOs from here is going to be a challenge!) The British among you are mostly going to have to ask your parents what the heck “O” levels were—they were the things before GCSEs. For everyone else, they are the exams we took at age 16 in the UK.
Messrs. Woodard and Hattersley were great teachers, in large part because they had great personalities that could engage with students, and to a lesser extent because they were a little forgetful. This led to some even more memorable occasions where the fume cupboard was left open, the Bunsen burners weren’t turned off, etc. One of the things that made their lessons so memorable were the practical experiments—never mind text book theory, let’s just do it!
One such experiment was the Haber process. Google can give you all the details, but it’s an example of how a catalyst is used in chemistry to accelerate or intensify a chemical reaction. Essentially, the presence of the catalyst—iron in the Haber process—allows a reaction to occur more effectively without the iron itself being affected. In the case of the Haber process, it’s the production of …
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"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them." - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
