PMI Global Insights

PMI Hours for Impact™ is dedicated to enabling the project management community to elevate its positive impact on society. PMI believes that protecting our planet and improving the lives of people worldwide is essential for creating peace and prosperity. Hours for Impact supports the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to better people’s lives and the planet, now and in the future. In the PMI Global Insights blog, we will share some of the uplifting stories from this initiative.

Tejiendo Futuros (Weaving Futures): Ingrid Villaseñor & Rubielka Romero

• Number of Hours Pledged: 350+
• SDGs Supported: #1 No Poverty, #2 Zero Hunger, #3 Good Health and Well-Being, #4 Quality Education, #8 Decent Work and Economic Growth, #11 Sustainable Cities and Communities
• Country: Guatemala

Ingrid Villaseñor notes that she was raised by a single mother who taught her that women are strong, successful and resilient. So in 2018, she founded Tejiendo Futuros (Weaving Futures)—a nonprofit offering social services to families in Guatemala that runs a network of programs to educate, feed, provide medical care and raise aspirations for vulnerable families. But she lacked a well-defined business plan and a capable team to help see through her vision. That’s where the nonprofit Project Managers Without Borders (PMWB) stepped in.

Between 2021 and 2022, Rubielka Romero—a PMP-certified project manager—voluntarily shared 350 hours of her expertise with Tejiendo Futuros. She was joined in the effort by María Laura González, PMP, Latin American community coordinator for PMWB.

See more of this inspiring story in this video, winner of two Gold Telly Awards!

Read more about Ingrid, Rubielka and Tejiendo Futuros here, and find out how you can make a different with PMI Hours for Impact!

More PMI Hours for Impact stories:

• Making Roads Safer

By: Vibha Tripathi

I presented at the PMI’s Virtual Experience Series 2023: 15 June. This was a great event with featured speakers, exhibits and networking activities.

My presentation, “Value of Technical Program Management vs. Program Management without Technical Understanding” focused on:

• Evolution of program/project management discipline as the industry landscape evolved with digital revolution and advanced and disruptive technologies changing the landscape in which program and projects are delivered.
• Leveraging the tools, technologies and paradigm from this advancement as well as evolving the mindset to effectively deliver in the changed landscape. 
• This evolution brought fore the effectiveness of the role that lies in problem solving which is a core value proposition of the role. 

During my presentation, I received a lot of great questions that we didn’t get a chance to cover, and my responses are below.

1. Is it better to have a specialist to keep an eye on the changing regulations rather than trying to stay on top of it as a PM?
   • That is correct having an expert to keep an eye on changes helps although if the answer for this is simple there is no need or no intrinsic value of PM/Pgm role, even an intern or executive assistant can organize meetings between various experts. Ability to find an appropriate expert and educating them about the program so they can suggest and/or keep any eye on certain markers which many impact the objective will differentiate between effective and ineffective PM. Even though it is never an exact science. Stating simplistically expert for compliance and regulatory landscape is the problem executives have with program and project managers. It shows lack of understanding- e.g.  what regulations you are talking about, for which region, for which regulations, what possible changes will impact objectives. Ideally it is the legal expertise needed but there have been many different branches of experts that have emerged depending on privacy, security, regulatory etc. compliance who work with legal experts. 
2. Many Program Managers emerge from a technical role and are technical leads at the same time. How do we differentiate the difference between program management and the tech design implementation or execution roles etc. including the product design or user experience you are sharing and how do we explain these existing company dynamics through our framework?
   • Being a technical lead and program manager is two different roles. Sometimes I play both the roles, in that case I clearly state – I am putting a hat of SME or hat of program manager. It goes back to my statement, the key aspect of program manager role is problem solving. It does not mean doing someone else’s role. To begin with program manager ascertains the various roles of the program, leads, SMEs, steering leaders, sponsors etc. , which in itself is a task which requires understanding of program and then later to create a framework where these roles plan out delivery and their roles in it (with you helping by keeping objectives as the focal point for mapping out delivery), which at times changes the need of the role or identifies new roles needed, which then you work with leaders to fill. Important point to understand is each lead has accountability and responsibility to deliver and program managers create /enable an environment framework where those leads can come to raise concerns and issues for delivery. Based on your knowledge of overall program and roles, you either show them the next steps or person who can help or assess that there is a gap which just got uncovered and bring forth right people who can help solve it. An analogy which actually happened recently in one of my programs is a good example to perceive this role. The way I planned the program, all teams will finish the work but will release it together on the go -live day. I worked with them to create release sequence and identified who will do it and then on the day called each of them out to press their ”Go” button.  One of my executive sponsors drew the parallel to NASA mission director – who calls out different teams if they are ready– navigation and communications, payload, program autonomy, flight dynamics, satellite control, propulsion control, telemetry command etc.  It is important to know the difference between enabling the role to do their job or doing their job and this is not easy part to learn, most of the leaders in program management fail in this task and become the example of why either leaders or their roles are more of a liability.
3. What is the role of the BA or Solution Architect if the PgM leads the technical arm?
   • Business Analyst, Solution Architect and any other role has specific delivery items which is decided in collaboration with them by the program manager. And, then work in collaboration with them for the effective delivery. Key part is that role definition is clear including responsibility of delivery but also important to know that a particular role should not collaborate or consult with other roles for their delivery. That is what the environment program manager needs to create along with steering leaders and sponsors so that the role definition is clear. Teams do not deliver in a silo, they work in a collaborative culture so specific delivery works towards overall objective and not on their own track.
4. What is the best way for a PM without a technical background to acquire better technical understanding?
   • Asking questions and developing logical ability to connect the dots along with empowering teams to ask questions, vent, discuss anything they need with you even if not relevant. Basic principles remain the same – you do not need to know the inner workings on a judiciary or legislative systems to know if a policy is conducive or not. So, how do you know which candidate to vote for? how do you learn about their political agenda and impact of their policies? – By participating in relevant conversations, reading relevant materials and most of all asking questions.
5. What level of technical knowledge is required for a technical program manager to be successful?
   • Mostly ability to use the knowledge that is needed more than technical knowledge itself. Point is what do you need to solve a problem to reach an objective and continuously learning from people and material as you take logical step to solve the problem. E.g. The company you work for do you know what product they create? Do you know what engineering methods they use for the product? Are there better engineering practices out there for these products to have better turnaround time, scalability, security etc.? What technology they use, and the methods and technology used have some non value added element?

In conclusion, I had a great time presenting, and the full presentation will be on demand through 31 January 2024. Visit PMI‘s Virtual Experience Series 2023: 15 June for more details.

By: Nick Sonnenberg
Founder, Leverage

In March, I had the honor of joining Kara Austin at the PMXPO Virtual Experience Series for the Book Club presentation (which you can still see on demand through January 31, 2024). I spoke about my book Come Up for Air, and continued the conversation in this blog in May when I answered some questions about changing “free for all” meeting attendance, work management tech systems, and getting your inbox to zero. Now it’s time for another round of Q&As that came from my session, where I address passion projects, overcoming obstacles, skill development and more!

1. What project have you worked on that you were most passionate about? 
The project I'm most passionate about is actually my book that just came out. We've been working on it for the last four years, and there's been so many moving parts. If we didn't have a work management tool to track all the different milestones and tasks, and collaborate with all the different people involved, this book wouldn't have happened.

We had projects for marketing, and then within that we had all the different marketing activities and initiatives like blogs and podcasts and ink articles; and then for actually writing the book, that was a separate project. So all of these various projects had all these milestones and tasks in there, which is where we collaborated. 

All those ultimately lived in a Come Up for Air portfolio, which housed all the projects. So in one place, we could see everything that needed to happen, all the milestones that we were going to hit. And yeah, it took a village to get this done, but if we didn't have it organized, it probably wouldn't have gotten done.

2. What obstacles did you need to overcome for this project to be a success?
So many obstacles. I would say time was the biggest obstacle. I'm the CEO of Leverage full-time, and working on a book is a full-time initiative in itself. So finding the time to be writing a book and working with the team on the book, as well as running a company, I think was the biggest challenge.

3. How did you overcome those challenges?
I would say one, we're all very efficient—we're not wasting time going on a scavenger hunt for information. By keeping things organized and not wasting time looking for something (”What's Aiden supposed to work on today?”), that saved a lot of time. 

I also have a fantastic team. I probably spent over 1,000 hours on this book, but if it weren't for having a full-time head of content on my team that wrote a lot of the book…I might have been able to still write a book, but it definitely wouldn't have been to the quality that you see it today. So I would say have a great team, have great systems. Ultimately, I think it's that simple—but it's not easy all the time to execute on.

4. What advice do you have, or what key lessons have you learned that have helped you manage projects better?
I would say the way that a project is kicked off is critical. So many people don't spend the time to kick it off properly. It could be over a text message or an email, or even in a work management tool, but it's not properly kicked off—meaning you don't establish clear owners or worlds and responsibilities. You don't spend the time to explain: Why are you doing this project? What does success look like? 

You know, a lot of people do post-mortems after projects where you reflect on what went well, what didn't go well, what was learned for the next time. But you might even want to consider a pre-mortem, where you sit down and say, “Okay, we got a book coming out February 2023. The goal is to hit the bestseller list. Now let's imagine that we don't.” And we start analyzing why we don't. You start having that conversation on the front end.

Across companies that we've seen, some teams do this—thinking through what the risks and challenges are, why we might not succeed. And having that conversation up front is so valuable. And having a project manager on the project, or someone that's responsible for making sure that the project's hygienic and that there's not a bunch of things past due, I think is critical as well. 

So in summary: Have you established roles and responsibilities to really kick it off properly with why are you doing this? What's the success criteria? In general, I like to think through the milestones that we need to be hitting before starting to think about all the minutiae, all the tasks. So on that kickoff call, we'll go through the high-level stuff, and then we'll start going from like 30,000 feet to 20,000 feet to 10,000 feet. Meaning, what are the milestones that we need to start hitting and laying out in order to achieve that bigger goal of completing the project? Once you get that, then we start thinking about what tasks we need to hit those milestones. 

5. What skills do you think are most important for project management?
A project manager needs to be organized. I think that you need to be technical, too. In this day and age—look, you could project manage off a piece of paper and a pen. But the future of project management is really about knowing how to use these more modern tools like Asana or ClickUp or Monday, because even if you are really well-organized and you have good follow-through and all of that, if you're not taking advantage of some of these really powerful tools—sure the project still might move forward and things will get done and you'll be on top of it, but these tools are built for a reason. They have functionality to make your life easier. They will allow you to move faster, not have to work as hard, maybe you can manage more projects. 

So you need those qualities of follow-through in an organization, but in the future it's gonna be more and more critical that you know how to use these more modern tools.

6. How would you recommend acquiring skills that someone might not have yet?
Read my book, Come Up for Air! Not to plug my book, but I wrote it because you need to know how to use the functionality of these tools. You could also go on YouTube to learn about how you do various things for whatever tool you need to use. What I found missing—and why I wrote the book—was there's not really best practices. Like, what's the purpose of the tool? When should you use one tool versus another? 

But there's a lot of free stuff online that people could just start Googling, honestly—Google is your friend. There are books out there. There's my book. PMI has some fantastic books, too. So, you know, there's some cheap solutions out there to really get started and inexpensively accelerate your learning.

7. What is your moonshot idea that you would love to assemble a team around and make reality?
Hmm, that's a great question. So this stuff that we do at Leverage, we do operational efficiency training and consulting. So regardless of whether you're a financial advisory firm or not—we've worked with companies that do poop spray, we've worked with some of the largest tech companies—everyone has very similar issues. And what we've established are best practices of when and how to use all these tools. 

And so in the future, what I envision Leverage doing is building technology. So imagine a bot that's living in your Slack or your Microsoft Teams or whatever your internal communication tool is, and that tool is connected to all of these other core tools that you use to collaborate—all these modern tools that kind of fit into my CPR framework that I talk about. Well, there's some common best practices that we teach that we could code and have a bot ping you and say, “Hey Kara, we notice that you have this many past-due tasks…”; or, “We notice that you haven't been getting to inbox zero in your email”; or, “Here’s a little video to remind you of what we've talked about before. And if you need some help, you could read this article or watch this video.”

So I think building some SaaS component to how we're training and consulting that connects to all these tools and tells you exactly where you’re missing the opportunity to be more efficient is the direction that we're going in.

By: Dr. Jennifer Donahue Ph.D.

Last month, I had the pleasure of presenting at the PMI Virtual Experience Series 2023: 15 June. This was a great event with featured speakers, exhibits and networking activities.  My presentation was “Becoming the Warrior: Strategies to Break Through and Achieve Your Goals and Dreams”.  During this talk, I focused on the fact that we all have passion-fueled dreams that may seem too bold or too risky.  We are continually challenged to meet goals, either the goals of our organization, or the goals we set in our personal life. However, we often feel that our goals and dreams are out of reach, that we are not ready, we don’t have the time, or maybe we’re just not good enough.

During my 45-minute session, I exposed the reasons why many of you are not moving forward.  We struggle with imposter syndrome, self-doubt, the fear of failing, and roadblocks.

I received a lot of great questions that I didn’t get a chance to cover, and my responses are below.

Question 1: The challenge is knowing when your fear is serving you well or hindering you.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. I think a little fear is always required.  That little bit of fear tells you that you are doing something extraordinary. You are breaking out of your comfort zone, you're trying something new, or you've made a decision that could create a whole new life for you.  This little bit of fear is what counteracts your complacency and status quo.

I think of fear as both rational and irrational. Rational fears might be those times when you're walking at night or in an unknown area and your “Spidey senses” start to tingle. It's good to listen to this type of fear.

Then there are irrational fears. I spoke about my fear of hummingbirds. I know that this is absolutely, completely irrational in every single way. Hummingbirds do not attack people (according to Google). 

The key is to try to find the difference between the two types of fears. If you were embarking on a new journey, you may have a fear that you will not succeed. Use this type of fear to understand exactly where it originates from.  Develop safeguards you can put in place to ensure that you succeed.

Being afraid is OK, but not going after your goals and dreams because of that fear, is not OK.

Question 2: I’m curious how much toxic culture plays into this.
This is an important observation that I have not made before. We understand that we may have feelings of imposture syndrome and self-doubt, but adding a toxic culture will only complicate the situation.  Toxic cultures are characterized by unhealthy or negative work environments that might include open hostility, bullying or discrimination.

When we combine these imposter syndrome and toxic environments, it becomes easier to reinforce those negative beliefs we have about ourselves.  Toxic work cultures are often epitomized by unhealthy competitions, lack of support, bullying, harassment, and devaluing other people's accomplishments. Working in a toxic work culture creates an even larger uphill battle to overcome our own imposter syndromes and self-doubt.

Question 3: We need to remember our TEAMS experience these emotions too so we must remember, speak life, and build people up... not validate the lies/fear people are struggling with internally.
This is absolutely the truth! As leaders it is our job to make sure that our teams are healthy.

I often discuss that good leadership starts with you and I know this may sound absolutely selfish.  As leaders we are told, “it's not about you, it's about your team.”  And while this is true, we must have ourselves “sorted out” before we go and effectively lead others.

Once done, that is when it's imperative to make sure that we are observing our personnel and assisting them with their goals and aspirations.  We are all human. We all have issues that might not be readily apparent on the surface. Understand that others may be struggling and engage with your team to see where you can assist. Many times, just offering positive reinforcement may help others in ways that you might not understand.

I had a great time presenting, and the full presentation will be on demand through 31 January 2024. Visit PMI Virtual Experience Series 2023 for more details.

PMI Hours for Impact™ is dedicated to enabling the project management community to elevate their positive impact on society. PMI believes that protecting our planet and improving the lives of people worldwide is essential for creating peace and prosperity. Hours for Impact supports the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to better people’s lives and the planet, now and in the future. In the PMI Global Insights blog, we will share some of the uplifting stories from this initiative.

Making Roads Safer: María Laura González, PMP and Fundación Educación Vial

• Number of Hours Pledged: 250 
• SDGs Supported: #3 Good Health and Well-Being, #4 Quality Education, #9 Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, #11 Sustainable Cities and Communities
• Country: Panama 

After being in a severe car accident at the age of 19, Osiris Gratacós decided to take action by launching Fundación Educación Vial, a nonprofit devoted to reducing the frequency of car accidents and cutting the fatality rate. She partnered with María Laura González, PMP, Latin American community coordinator for Project Managers Without Borders (PMWB) to help manage this impactful project in Panama.

In 2022, Maria Laura voluntarily shared 250 hours of her expertise with the nonprofit. She shares her inspirational story in this video:

Read more about Maria and Fundación Educación Vial here, and find out how you can make a different with PMI Hours for Impact!