3 Things I Learned From PMI Co-Founder James R. Snyder

Kevin P Korterud is an Associate Director in Accenture’s Delivery Excelleence practice and currently serves as a as a subject matter expert in the areas of high performance Project, Program and Agile Product Delivery. In addition, he serves as a thought leader in harmonizing Waterfall/Agile delivery as well as in the design, build and implementation of Enterprise, Transformation and Program PMOs.

  Career Development  

James R. Snyder recently passed away, and we are all affected by it.

He was one of the original founders of PMI, and did everything possible to foster a professional foundation for project management. He and others created the outstanding organization that is PMI today, and represents (in software terms) “Project Manager Version 1.0”—who all had to do a lot of things using their own ingenuity without all of the great enablers we have today.

I was fortunate to have partnered with James on a few project management symposiums where we mutually covered the history and future of project management. While those presentations represented a pivotal moment in my project management career, it was the informal conversations before and after that were most memorable and had a profound impact on how I viewed our profession.  

James and I discussed what project management was like before PMI—much more of a craft than a structured scientific approach. This was largely due to the limited inroads that technology was making into our lives.

When James and I performed what was known then as project management, we worked on programs. Those programs were not what we know today as packages for multiple project tracks, but a singular body of computer code. The “programs” as we knew them served to primarily input data and produce simple online …

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