Have Project Management activities been affected by the situation in Venezuela?

There have been a lot of replies to this thread and they all point to the same problems. Managing projects in Venezuela nowadays is such a challenge, regardless of the industry or project size. My two cents to this discussion are: choose your client very carefully; check that the project actually makes sense and is complete from a conceptual point of view (in other words, check the business case); only after passing those two gates should you start looking more deeply into other project management aspects. And, as it has been said before here, creativity helps a lot.

Hi, George. To answer your question: Yes, Project Management activities have been affected by the situation in Venezuela.

Due to the constraints in Currency, Times of import (when possible), low availability of local providers, or supplies, and frequent changes in regulations, any estimate MUST be checked monthly, weekly or even daily. Which means that there are 3 Knowledge Areas the should be heavily stressed in Venezuela's current situation. Those are: Risk Management; Cost Management; and Procurement Management.

This also applies to the initial Project Charter; any premises, expected benefits or goals for the Project ought to be validated regularly. Has something changed? Are the premises being kept? some change in regulation affects the Projects and its expected benefits? If the answer is yes,Then its time to SUSPEND, STOP or REFORMULATE the Project.

Finally, in Venezuela, for a project to be succesful, it should have a short and well defined scope (in order to deal with inflation). Risk analysis must be through, to avoid Projects falling into crisis. This is the time when being AGILE pays off.

Absolutely YES.

I´ll try to explain the dramatic situation. Two point of view.

Positive: 1) You HAVE to develop more and more your soft skills: motivational, conflict resolution etc...in order to motivate co workers and companies to finish the project. 2) Your LEARN when a project is going to fail ( if you dont have material, bad contractor, high inflation) you can not control the project. 3) You must train staff regularly, many experienced engineers are emigrating. You are helping people who come with little experience
Negative: 1) PMI code of ethics. Some companies are not chosen to the regular process, interest conflict is becoming normal. In this difficult situation there are some companies taking advantage. Contractor have more power that the PM and they demand to remove them, that´s why PM try to maintain their job. 2)Plan and control change everyday. 3) Close a project is even more dificult of all, because scope is not finished, budget sometimes is spent because high inflation, so how can it apply EVM? 4) Risk is common.

I want to emphasize that before this situation it was normal to use PM guide.

I am doing the best for finish some strategic project.

Best regards

Yes
My experience is just related to software development projects. My last two years there, my projects weren't so affected because I was in a multilateral company, so most of things were managed abroad, I just had to coordinate from Vzla. The only things that could cause direct impact would be protests and unexpected holidays. So the risks related to the situation were in terms of time. Coincidentally, I didnt have any need for procurement (in terms of purchases), I just had to allocate the resources in the given infrastructure.

Before that experience (when things were bad, but not that much as nowadays), the exchange control was causing huge problems around the procurement, high risks related to that. In terms of human resources, being from the provider point of view was difficult to contract (or even keep) high talented resources because the incapability to increase the salary in proportion to inflation. I understand that some companies are offering salary/benefices in USD to employees to mitigate this. On the other hand, clients were reducing costs, so the investment in technology was reducing, meaning less contracts. Those things affect quality and budget.

I am not in Vzla since last year.