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PMI Certifications - The Latest and Greatest
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Interviews
Categories: Interviews
Situation: You're looking for ways to enhance your career.  A couple of weeks ago, Ron Hanchar was named Director of Certification at PMI®. Since PMI certification is so near and dear to many of our members' hearts, I though it would be a good idea to get Ron's take on where things are going.Q. What's new in PMI certification? Is the push more horizontal, into areas related to Project Management or are the new programs more about roles at different organizational levels? PMI recently introduced the PgMP® credential for individuals who achieve organizational objectives by overseeing a program that consists of multiple projects. The PgMP credential holder maintains alignment of program scope with strategic business objectives. They define projects and assign project managers to manage their cost, schedule and performance. To earn the credential, the PgMP candidate is required to successfully complete three assessments--panel review and application, multiple choice examination and Multi-rater Assessment (MRA). The MRA requires performance evaluations by work colleagues. We are looking at what the project management community needs and are building new credentials based on market research that measures and tracks new developments in the profession. The PgMP credential acknowledges the more strategic organizational role of project management. We also have determined that there are needs in scheduling and other specialty areas. We will continue our market research in 2008 to help us to determine if there are additional roles and functions in which the project management community has needs. Q. PMI has really focused on becoming more global in recent years. How is that reflected in the certification program? Are some certifications localized? PMI's certification program was first discussed by the PMI board in 1977, and the Project Management Professional (PMP®) certification was launched in 1984. In 1995, there were 500 PMPs; today there are more than 260,000. Since then, the Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM®) and the Program Management Professional (PgMP) have been added to the PMI family of credentials. From the beginning, the focus has been on developing, with input from around the world, credentials that verify a project manager's understanding of the profession and the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK®) Guide -- the recognized authoritative reference on project management. More than two million copies of the PMBOK Guide are in circulation, and it has been published in 10 languages. Candidates for PMI credentials must do more than study the PMBOK® Guide and successfully pass a test. They also must have practical experience as a project or program manager and must be favorably evaluated by others in the profession. PMI credentials are developed to benefit not only the project manager's career but also the needs of organizations for which they work. Over the past few years, PMI's certification program has more than quadrupled in the number of credentialed individuals to 270,000 plus worldwide. Globally, this has been reflected in recent years in a noticeable shift in the percent of credentialed individuals by region from being North America centric to being truly international. As the number of credentialed individuals continues to rise, the proportion of credentialed individuals in Asia Pacific and Europe - Middle East - Asia has increased significantly. Looking at PMP credentials, there were almost 48,000 PMPs in the United States in 2003; today, there are more than 150,000. In Europe, there were about 7,000 PMPs in 2003 and today almost 23,000 PMPs. In China, there are roughly 22,000 PMPs today - a dramatic growth of more than six times its 3,500 PMPs in 2003. Similarly, PMPs have increased tenfold in India where there were 1,420 PMPs in 2003. Today, there are approximately 14,000 PMPs in India. China and India are utilizing project management to build their nations as they develop and compete in today's globalized economy. PMI credentials are developed through a rigorous process that involved PMI members from each of the four regions served by PMI -- North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific and Europe, Middle East and Africa. PMI certifications are the same worldwide; PMI does not offer localized credentials. Q. Do you feel that the PMP certification will ever be a licensing requirement for project management? (like a CPA and others) There are organizations today that require the PMP certification. Ultimately, we want more organizations to require professional project management credentials so they will attract quality project managers who can deliver projects on time and within budget. The goal of project management is to make organizations successful, and we think hiring qualified project managers is directly attributable to that success. |
Posted on: March 01, 2008 02:07 PM
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Large-Scale, Lightweight Reporting
Situation: You need a robust reporting solution, but don't want a full-blown data warehouse. The whole business intelligence thing can be fairly daunting. Implementations can be costly and complicated when sometimes you just need "more reports, faster". JReport is one of the software tools that can help get you there. We recently spoke with Whit Mathis, VP of Sales at Jinfonet, who gave us some insight into when this sort of tool might be right for you.Q. What are three things that people often forget when creating reports? -The type of architecture required and flexibility of the reporting application. It is very easy for reporting requirements to become complex and JReport reduces that complexity with simple, straight forward architecture (less hardware), yet is flexible enough to meet demanding reporting requirements. Large BI vendors can require complex configurations for installation and on the other side Open Source vendors often do not have the flexibility to meet enterprise BI requirements. - Considering future reporting needs and how they will change/adapt to those new requirements. JReport is very extensible and can meet embedded BI requirements now and those to come. - Some users will want to create their own reports easily or chose their own data to view. JReport offers Adhoc capabilities which empowers the end-user to view the data they determine relevant. Q. What makes JReport different from its competition? - Completely Java based with robust functionality. A major credit card processing company wanted to integrate their existing Java architecture that is used for their mission critical applications with a robust reporting platform. JReport offered a fully compliant java solution along with all the features they needed to support 1000's of users. Our ISV customers, which represent many top tier technical companies, use JReport since they can have a very small resource footprint in their applications, yet offer value add features to their end users. With the ability to white label our application, this creates a competitive advantage for the solutions which embed JReport. Q. What skills and knowledge enable a user to effectively use your report designer? -JReport provides IDE that makes using the report designer very straightforward. Customers that understand data relationships and how reports should look will easily be able to create highly usable business data. JReport also provides professional services to those who need assistance with this or would like jump start. Q. Which types of reporting are perfect for your software? Which are not? - We’re good for extremely lightweight, powerful reporting - We’re good for departments who need a solution that can adapt to specific reporting need or an enterprise that does not need to be integrated with a Data warehouse. - We’re good for challenging performance and scalability requirements. - We’re good for business users that need real time access to data but do not want to learn complex reporting platforms -We’re not perfect for big, overarching BI + data warehouse architectures or small, one-off reporting fixes -We are not good for very simple reporting with small user base - We are not good for anyone stuck on excel spreadsheets for reporting because they won’t utilize the capabilities that a robust reporting solution like JReport delivers. |
Posted on: March 01, 2008 12:47 PM
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Truth (or Clarity) in Scheduling
Situation: You need a more accurate project schedule (and who doesnt?). The inspiration for the whole Agile movement hinged on the fact that we all know that linear schedules are usually wrong. The more complex the project, the more that is true. Agile approaches are one way of dealing with that uncomfortable truth. Another is to use a really interesting approach offered by the folks at Liquid Planner. Recently, we spoke with Charles Seybold, their CEO and founder who offered us some insight into how the tool works.Q. Liquid Planner uses date ranges and probabilities to deliver a more accurate view of project progress. It’s pretty clear how that could be more accurate than any single date. Could you talk a bit about how input from team members affects deadlines? First off, we don’t actually have an entity called a deadline in LiquidPlanner. Rather we have expected dates which we mark with a big [E] on the schedule (these are always flowing) and we have promise dates which are shown on the schedule with the traditional black diamond of a deadline. The key is to manage to the [E] but set your promise dates at the end of the bars (which are drawn to the 98% confidence date). Setting the promise date “locks” your commitment and you will get an alert if any action puts those promise dates at risk. Any item can have a promise date, but they work best on projects and deliverables. By asking team members to estimate in a range you are giving them a mechanism which allows them to be honest. Most things have intrinsic uncertainty so we just cannot be that precise. For instance, can we really say we will be done in with exactly 10 days of effort? If the person says 9-11 days, that tells you they probably have it under pretty good control. If they say 5-15 days, that says something is not well known and that working to understand the requirements better might pay off. What really is a single point estimate? It is the expected case? Best case? Worst case? A sandbag perhaps? It’s fun to note that estimating in ranges pretty much eliminates “sandbagging”. This phenomenon happens when single point estimation meets experience. The experienced worker knows that they need to give estimates they feel 90% confident in so that they will not get dinged for a miss, but when you estimate at that level, 9 times out of 10 you’ll be early. When that happens the worker can sometimes fill that time with things that maybe were not part of the plan and… well you know the rest. Single point estimates are just bad for relationships. The other great thing about a team member capturing uncertainty is that it inherits through their chain of prioritized work so that the exit dates on later work get a correspondingly higher about of uncertainty even if they are small tasks. This makes sense because if the exit date of your first task is uncertain, the start date of your next task is uncertain. Q. I personally like the Liquid Planner interface from a usability perspective. What unique steps did you take to test Liquid Planner before its release? From a usability perspective, how do you think it compares to other Ruby on Rails PM apps like Basecamp? (using specific examples) I’ll interpret your question broadly. In my previous corporate gig like I spent a great deal of time working on planning tools (mostly Excel based) where we were modeling concepts like ranged estimation and flowing work. From basically the first week of LiquidPlanner’s existence, we started prototyping. I maintained a prototype in PowerPoint that we used to mock up every feature we added and I kept that prototype up to date with the work the dev team was doing. This allowed us to test designs very early and make very rapid decisions and modifications for the UI. In short, it was try-fail-learn at a very fast, ridiculously lost cost rate. Looking back at my archive, I see over 200 versions of prototype. This allowed us to narrow in on a design that felt right to us and our friends many months before we put it in the hands of Alpha customers. Even with that, we’re not perfect; we found some things that needed rework in our private alpha and I expect we’ll find and fix some things in the beta. We are built on Ruby on Rails and drew inspiration from what the 37 Signals crew accomplished. We like Basecamp and think they did a great job showing the world that web software could be easy. There are many applications out there that are basically Basecamp clones and we think there is no point in repeating that again. Our goal with LiquidPlanner was to take on a much broader set of objectives for a higher level of professional planning. We wanted to build for a greater scale with hundreds of projects and thousands of tasks. We wanted to be more like a desktop application. LiquidPlanner is designed to be a platform for project management which, over time, will grow to serve large enterprises while staying true to our belief that the most important feature is usability. Since you asked for an example, I’ll point out that many of the lightweight online task management tools are not built to put a ton of data in them. LiquidPlanner is build like a data warehouse and uses rich work breakdown structure as the backbone of your collaboration data so that your discussions, documents, and reports will stay organized as you reorganize your plan. Q. I really like the idea of everyone owning the schedule, based on their direct input. Are there typical ways outside of the tool that PMs motivate team members to give honest input (versus padding their tasks) so that you can maximize accuracy? None that we know of that work with other tools on the market. Fundamentally a single point estimate is interpreted as a promise and this means that people will negotiate or obfuscate through them. A pattern we see is that the estimate giver and the estimate taker often do not have the same skill level in negotiation and the estimate giver gets backed into what we call “the least defensible estimate” which lies very close to the optimistic estimate. Some techniques for getting better estimates from your team are tee-shirt sizing, wide band Delphi, and estimating by analogy but they all embrace notions of uncertainty and calibration. Group estimating is quite effective even informally. Q. You talk a lot about “one source of truth”. How do you see requirements playing into that “single big picture” view of the project, when using Liquid Planner? Another word for truth is clarity, and any process that you can bring more clarity to is what we are talking about. For example, in my last company we had a full SDLC and wrote specifications full of requirements for development work. We had a system of rating the specs 1 through 4 based on their “readiness” for Dev; level 4 meant it was done. In practice this was a binary state – not ready vs. ready. I submit their would be real value in a ranged estimate at these stages to capture a meaningful metric regarding how much uncertainty exists. I think the feedback would be super useful to the person responsible for the requirements as well as a manager who wants to be able to direct her efforts to the projects with the most uncertainty. If you want to take it a step further, you can do what we do, which is spec requirements in LiquidPlanner and let the projects, categories, and work items carried those requirements with them. That way each item can be assigned and estimated as you go and you can use uncertainty to guide your management actions. It’s the best way to facilitate one of my favorite practices: cut early and cut often. |
Posted on: February 25, 2008 04:57 AM
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A New Way to Look at Search
Situation: You need a to increase your search speed. ManagedQ isn't another search engine. It offers an interesting new - visually logical - way to look at search results. This is the sort of thing you have to try to really understand, but I think it has a lot of potential. On the left-hand tool bar, it breaks down the search results into People, Places, and Things. In the main body of the screen, you get screen snaps of the results under each category. So you immediately see where you are going. It's like the difference between having your headlights on or off as you drive down the road at dusk. You react a little more quickly and perhaps get where you are going faster. -- kind of like a more advanced version of Ask.com's pop-up previews.Again, a picture speaks a thousand words - so go ahead and give it a try... |
Posted on: February 23, 2008 09:48 AM
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Did You Know You Have 5GB of Free MS Storage on the Web?
Situation: You Need a Little More (Hard Drive) Space. As part of its LIVE program, Microsoft offers SkyDrive, FREE storage on the web that you can use as back up space, a place to share large files - or anything that the pack rat in you demands you keep. Obviously lots of vendors do this, but 5GB is lots of space for free and MS will likely be around for quite some time.The SkyDrive is linked to (really sort of the back-end for) Spaces, which is Microsofts answer to Facebook. If you are an MS Messenger user, this might interest you as well. The whole LIVE scene is completed by OfficeLive, the SaaS (really lite online) version of MS Office which I've reviewed in past postings. |
Posted on: February 22, 2008 02:08 PM
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