Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Day 1 - Project to the Point

I am in Cairo and the first day of the Projects to the Point conference has just wrapped up. Today featured a number of keynote speakers, including the current and immediate past chairs of PMI (Ricardo Vargas and Philip Diab), as well as H.E. Dr Ahmed Darwish, Minister of State of Administrative Development for the Egyptian government.

The Arabian Gulf Chapter of PMI recently conducted a survey into project failure. The leading cause, based on their failure, was project managers without the proper training/experience to run projects. Mr. Diab cited the young workforce in the middle east region as a factor in being able to meet the project management demands.

One of my presentations tomorrow is on knowledge management (KM), very relevant based on today's comments. A part of KM is being able to implement coaching and mentoring to share tacit knowledge among project managers. Tacit knowledge is that stuff that isn't easy to communicate, like how to run a project successfully. It requires more time commitment for experienced project managers as they need to bring their protégées up to speed as a master craftsman trains an apprentice.

4 comments:

  1. The concept of "project" is the root cause of project failure. Balkanising work, parcelling it up into (generally large) batches, so increasing delays and hence, costs - these are all caused by not taking a flow perspective (i.e. doing away with the flow-constraining idea of "projects" entirely).

    - Bob
    (@flowchainsensei)

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  2. Bob - I agree. I think the smaller the project, the higher chance for success.

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