PMI Global Insights

I interviewed speakers who came with hot topics. Here are 8 short interviews (from 1 to 3 minutes) about things that you should hear more about in the coming months.

Mindfulness

According to George Pitagorsky, mindfulness is the capacity to be objectively aware of anything and everything that is rising in and around you.

Interview: https://youtu.be/m5UQYGfGuCA

Servant leadership: a project manager in the storm

Doug Humbert genuinely talked about servant leadership from a real case study taken from hos professional experience.

Interview: https://youtu.be/TgDm95e9GI4

Portfolio management reduces project failure

Majeed Hosseiney and Michael Frenette explain that to understand the main causes of project failure, we need to look outside of the iron triangle (cost, time, scope) and use portfolio management.

Interview: https://youtu.be/vDtjzfegCfU

Speak the language of the sponsor

Alfonso Bucero reminds us that, as project managers, we need to consider our project from a strategic perspective to better communicate with our project sponsor.

Interview: https://youtu.be/pj7EZvbW8-A

Global project communication

Mohamed Khalifa and Muhammad Ilyas shared a tool that helps understand differences between cultures so that we can better communicate with stakeholders on projects with multicultural teams.

Interview: https://youtu.be/dhg0ph04rzk

PDRI: Project Definition Rating Index

Joy Gumz presented PDRI, a tool for scope definition in large, complex, non-agile projet management.

Interview: https://youtu.be/k7Zh_v-_x4k

Handling complexity

Leon Herszon identified 15 complexity factors that have an impact of cost estimation. His tool provides guidelines based on complexity assessment.

Interview: https://youtu.be/OA30kPEN4ao

Bridge the gap between organizational silos

According to Saadi Adra, business development and project management often work in silos. He proposes a tool to increase collaboration between both.

Interview: https://youtu.be/k6Og5LAZeD4

Thanks to the community team: Kristin Jones, Laura Samso, Sarah Mersereau and Fabio Rigamonti!

PMI Congresses fuel me, inspire me. Not in the way that I come here to fine concrete or plugg & play solutions to my problems. It is rather a place where I find raw material that I (may) use to elaborate new solutions. I always fine good raw material.

R&D - Ripoff & Duplicate

This time in Rome I attended sessions on innovation. Like most (if not all), I really liked the closing keynote, Magnus Lindkvist. I thought he had both an original style and an original content. His message was: we are good at imitating and poor at innovating. Doesn't it reminds you with my post yesterday? See here Project Management is imitation, not innovation.

For Lindkvisk, R&D means for him Ripoff & Duplicate (rather than Research and Development). I love the idea. Our everyday life proove it: we all want the same jobs, the same fancy places where to live, the same cars, the same team members, the same tools, the same best practices... don't we?

Innovation is for people the fools, those who do what others don't, they go where others don't, they buy what others don't... Innovation requires that you strongly believe in your value system to continue out of the roads. 

Yeah!

I've lost my keys in the garden and I look for them in the livingroom because it's dark outside

Today, I've attended Mike Fernette and Majeed Hosseiney presentation in Rome at the PMI EMEA Congress. They started with the following short story. Majeed had lost his keys. He was looking for them where the light was. But the keys were in a shadow place. So he couldn't see them. Mike found the keys.

The Hamdan Bin Mohammed Award

I thought this allegory was good to illustrate what I felt when attending the Hamdan Bin Mohammed presentation a few minutes before. The initiative is amazing and, as a project manager, you should look for more information about it by following the link because you could win one of the prizes in a pool of $550,000!

Project management relies on imitation not on innovation

I believe the Hamdan Bin Mohammed initiative is great to get micro-innovation (incremental innovation) in the project management profession. The reason why I believe that is because they talk to the project management profession. People who consider themselves as professional PM already meet each other so they talk about what they do and share their best ideas. The project management profession relies on mimetism (or imitation if you prefer this word): we learn from each other by copying each other. PMI was founded and exists so that people who do project management can meet each other and share their problems and the solutions: that's imitation, copying, mimetism... The core value of project management is imitation, not innovation.

Radical innovation will come from outside the profession

I believe that radical innovation in project management will come from outside of the project management profession, from people who don't know they do project management. Those people have developed specific solutions to their problem. They don't call it innovation because they don't know it is different to what others do. And they don't know that what they do could be applied in other contexts.

What do you think?

Presenter: George Pitagorsky

I think ideas presented are quite interesting. They included:

Intelligence

IQ is not enough. Intelligence is more complex than just IQ. There are also cognitive intelligence, emotional intelligence, social intelligence...

Success

Success is not only about capability to do something. What is the attitute, the mood that you are bringing to a situation? Is it compatible or incompatible?

Performance factors

Performance factors are more complex than we usually envision them. They include: cognitive readiness, personality, intelligence, motivation, knowledge & experience, perspectives, mindful awareness (being awake, knowing what's going on purposefully)...

Mindfulness meditation

Mindfulness meditation: enhance attention (Eastern) to make distinctions (Western countries) and make better decisions. Mindfulness is a matter of physical attitude: observing outside and inside the body.

From ideas to practice

The irony is that I have the impression that instead of getting more aware during the session, people got more and more asleep... Then suddently my neighborgh behind, from Venezuela, asked a question and he awaked the audience.

New to some project managers

According  to the questions, it looks like the topic is interesting over all and people are willing to learn and above all to PRACTICE at next PMI congresses!

Presented by Joy Gumz

Scope definition is like iceberg

You don't know all about the project until the end, when it's to late to make decisions...

• 5% to 15% of resources are spent inplanning
• 2% to 20% in design
• 65% to 93% in construction

Problem: what if there is a change to the project in the middle or at the end of the project? It will make a major impact.

PDRI

When you cannot go agile, here is the tool you should use. It's called PDRI: project definition rating index. It comes from the construction industry in 1996 in the oil & gaz industry in Texas. It is based on questions:

1. Are we doing the right project?
   1. business strategy
   2. owner philosophy
   3. project requirements
2. Are we doing the right requirements? and Are we doing the right project?
   1. site information (where it's built)
   2. building programming
   3. building and project design parameters (large? complex building?)
   4. equipment 
3. Do we have the right project management approach?
   1. procurement strategy
   2. deliverables
   3. project control
   4. project executions plan

Each element is rated from 5 (incomplete or poor) to 1 (complete). At the end, the goal is to have the lowest score (< = 200) between 70 and 1000. It's better if the assessor is not the PM.

Risk: PDRI is not a project manger assessement. Some people hide the information not to be evaluated. 

Benefits

• Perform the right project
• Higher probability of meeting cost and schedule
• Lower percentage of change order
• Improve predictibility
• Consensus between project stakeholders
• Handle complex projects, large projects
• ...

Who uses PDRI:

Saudi Aramco, Chevron, Nasa, Bechtel, ABB Lumus, Black and Veatch, KBR, Aecom, Exxon-Mobile...