Not a Career for the Weak: Insights with James Brown

Vincent is Associate Underwriter for Nationwide Insurance in Des Moines, Iowa.

  Career Development   New Practitioners   Strategy   Using PMI Standards  

Vincent Chukwuemeka, the Director of Membership at the PMI Central Iowa chapter, recently interviewed James Brown, who lives and works in Central Iowa.

Vincent: Who is James Brown?

James: As a Director within the Platform Management organization for DuPont, I am responsible for building and maintaining a world-class organization that supports the development of many projects, programs and portfolios which span across the DuPont organization. I am also the Chairman of the Project Management Center of Excellence (PMCoE).

Vincent: Can you tell us your project management story?

James: I have over 20 years of project and program management experience with large and mid-size corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Intel, Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, Mentor Graphics, Rockwell Automation and now DuPont.

The beginning of my professional career in project and program management began when I joined Lockheed Martin. I was very fortunate to have been assigned to install and maintain a commercial Earned Value Management System (EVMS), which was becoming a contractual requirement on large U.S. government-funded programs. This assignment put me in close contact with the program management group, and the leader of that group provided me with mentorship that ultimately lead me to be transferred into the group.

My first project management assignment within the group was to lead a …

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