Walter Ginevri, PMI Fellow: My professional story before and after volunteering for PMI & PMIEF

 

Dear Project Management for Future Leaders blog readers,

We are honoured to have Walter Ginevri write about his experiences with PMI and the passion he has for bringing the world of project management to young people.  Walter is a PMI Fellow, Past-President of the Northern Italy Chapter,  current member of the PMIEF Board and father of a fantastic toolkit for primary school students.

I am certain you will thoroughly enjoy Walter’s article and the items to which he has provided links. Many thanks to Walter for taking the time and effort to submit it for our reading pleasure.

Grazie Mille, Walter!

Mike Frenette

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My professional story before and after volunteering for PMI & PMIEF

by Walter Ginevri, PMI Fellow

If I think about history books, the most recurrent time boundary is related to the birth of Jesus, in relation to which events are divided through the suffix B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini).

However, if I think about my professional history, the time boundary I can use to go from “before” to “after” is 2006, the year I started volunteering for PMI and PMIEF.

Why?

Because, thanks to that decision, I’ve been able to understand the deep essence of project management, to change progressively many of my convictions, to make my profession more exciting and motivating, to become a better professional and an open-minded citizen of the global world.

With regard to my PMI volunteering, in January 2006 I joined the Board of the PMI Northern Italy Chapter, a professional community of almost 400 members. After ten years of exciting experiences, including a research project about complexity theory applied to projects, I left a chapter with almost 2000 members and a retention rate amongst the highest worldwide.

With regard to my PMIEF volunteering, from 2006 onward, I’ve devoted myself to the dissemination of the project language within primary schools. Here again, it has been an inspiring experience that allowed me not only to spread a toolkit currently available in 14 languages (https://pmief.org/library/resources/projects-from-the-future-kit-for-primary-school), but also to share my storytelling with Bernie Trilling in a book focused on the link between project management and education (https://pmief.org/library/project-management-for-education).

Now, what I’d like to share with you is the following list of statements in which I’ve tried summarize the progressive evolution of my way of being a project management professional before volunteering (B.V.) and after volunteering (A.V.) for PMI and PMIEF. In particular, the following reflections are the outcomes of my collaboration with dozens of primary school teachers, passionate people who taught me how to live my profession, wonderful people who have the delicate mission of preparing new generations for a bright future.

B.V. #1: Project management is a technical discipline constituted by a wide set of best practices to be adapted by a professional and applied to a specific business context.

A.V. #1: Project management is a universal language that can be practiced by everybody because it makes available a wide set of intuitive tools for “thinking & doing”. The fact that “Project-Based Learning” is the most popular trend within school systems represents a further evidence of this statement.

B.V. #2: A project manager is constantly looking for the “optimum”, even if the context is characterized by a high level of complexity and uncertainty.

A.V. #2: A project manager is constantly moving through different domains that can be: simple, complicated, complex and chaotic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework). So, a project manager must be able to combine different strategies (e.g. “design & implementation” versus “exploration & exploitation”) and, sometimes, to search and accept “sub-optimal” solutions (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/330323.A_Treatise_on_Efficacy).

B.V. #3: The most important part of a project journey is the destination, that is, the set of deliverables agreed with the customer.

A.V. #3: Since a project is a collective experience, the delivery is just as important as the experiential journey through which each team member has the opportunity to grow both professionally and personally.

B.V. #4: The ability to manage chronological time is essential in order to meet project deadlines and set the pace of the project team.

A.V. #4: Besides “quantitative time”, a project practitioner must be able to manage “qualitative time”, the time not measurable in minutes, hours or days because it’s the time spent to engage a critical stakeholder, to catch emerging issues and weak signals, to practice active listening and provide feedback, to empower the project team and, in general, to stimulate the most powerful intrinsic motivators of people: autonomy, mastery and purpose (https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation).

B.V. #5: Project management books are the best way to enrich the knowledge of a professional who works in complex environments.

A.V. #5: In addition to specialists’ books, it’s essential to continue to explore the multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural dimension of project management. For example, a book about ethnography contains many ideas and best practices that can be used to manage project stakeholders. As further examples, some masterworks of literature such as Don Quixote or Pinocchio can help us to comprehend the essence of leadership much better than many books that promise to transform everybody into a leader. In general, every effort to enrich both scientific and humanistic knowledge is the best investment for a practitioner who wants to “make project management indispensable for business results”.

B.V. #6: Project management should be taught in secondary schools and universities so that students can be more prepared to enter the labour market.

A.V. #6: Primary school is the ideal place to start the dissemination of project language because of its extraordinary effects on students’ learning processes and life skills, such as: creative and critical thinking, communication and collaboration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Cs_of_21st_century_learning).

B.V. #7: The PMI Talent Triangle is a very effective framework to represent the ideal skill mix of a project management practitioner and the way to strengthen it.

A.V. #7: In addition to strategic business management, technical project management, and leadership, there is a fourth dimension corresponding to the transformative aspect of volunteering, an experience that, not only transforms you as an individual, but it even changes the talent triangle to a 3-dimensional pyramid.

This is my personal view of project management before and after PMI & PMIEF volunteering. So, I'm not speaking on behalf of the PMIEF Board, but more as a seasoned volunteer and project manager.  

I hope it will be helpful for all those who agree with this quote of Alvin Toffler, an American futurist:

“'The illiterate of the 21^st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”