Interview: Dr. Ginger Levin and PMI Fellow Russ Archibald

Ginger Levin specializes in the program, portfolio and OPM fields. She is a PMP, PgMP, an OPM3 Professional and a member of PMI's Registered Consulting Program. She received the Eric Jenett Award in 2014.

  Career Development  

It is my pleasure to present notes from an interview I did with a long-time friend and mentor, Russ Archibald, who was the sixth person in the world to join the Project Management Institute. Russ, along with his grandson, Shane Archibald, recently wrote the second edition of their book Leading and Managing Innovation, published late in 2015. To me, it is a must-read by people in the project field at any level.

Ginger: Russ, what are the changes you have seen in the growth of project management during your interesting career?

Russ: My first project was in 1949, as the owner's inspector to construct and start up a large vacuum distillation unit in a refinery in western Venezuela. Twenty years and quite a few projects later, my paper when PMI was being established in 1969, described some key issues that we are still dealing with today. Formal project management during that time dealt almost entirely with aerospace and construction. It was just starting to be applied on telecommunications and information systems projects. Today, of course, we recognize projects in every type of business, industry and governmental agency.

In addition to this widespread use of PM concepts, the changes over the last five decades in integrated project management digital information systems are perhaps the most significant, and these changes reflect and support our continual advances in …

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