Building a PM Community

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

  Career Development   Communications Management   Talent Management  

Communities exist because people do not live well in complete isolation. There may be the odd exception to this in the form of hermits or video game addicts, but in general people need people to survive and thrive. This certainly holds true for project managers just as it does for anyone. Sometimes, though, the project management role is a lonely position. Whether engrossed in a gantt chart, quality report or risk analysis (or perhaps snoozing at his desk), the project manager can feel quite alone in his or her pursuit to keep the project on track.

An established project management office can help provide a group of like-minded individuals to work with on a daily basis. While it is helpful to have a project management office, oftentimes the roles are segregated such that each project manager in the PMO is working in different areas. It can be very difficult to get an individual obsessed with quality management to care at all about following a tight schedule with no leeway in it for extra quality checks on work products. That situation lends itself more to conflicts than community.

There are many ways that a project manager can find or create a community of support. Doing the work to maintain a community may be time consuming, and unfortunately project management is not something that lends itself to a great deal of extra time. The benefits from participating in such …

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