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.

Making Lessons Learned Work

I had a project go live this week, always a good thing. I mentioned that we ran our retrospective last week. Today I came full circle with that discussion. I pulled together the other PMs in the company for an internal discussion of the results of the retrospective.

We did find one common theme that extended to other projects we've executed. And while we discussed how to address the issue, that isn't the point here (but maybe for a future blog post). Today I wanted to discuss knowledge management.

Knowledge management is about changing behavior. If I conduct a lessons learned session and in the future review those notes as I'm preparing for a future project, that's a step in the right direction. It beats putting the notes in a shared drive and never looking at them again. If I pull together my community to discuss the outcomes, that's even better.

So what have you learned lately and who have you shared it with? Do you have an internal team to share with? Would it be a good blog post? Maybe an article for a magazine. Don't just keep it to yourself.