asapm Education and Learning Section
 From the Ivory Tower
asapm Education Director, July 2004-August 2005: Donna Fitzgerald
Well, the Educational Project Team is up and functioning.
As I mentioned in my last column our goal is to prepare three packages
a month to support our newly forming PMCoPs.
We have chosen three topics to start with:
1. Risk
2. Project Startup
3. Communication Project Risks
Probably the most important skill any project manager has is the ability
to grow eyes in the back of their heads and develop a well honed spider
sense as to when something is tending in the wrong direction on his project.
According to the NCB (Our own competence baseline) Project oriented
risk management is:
The processes of identification, categorization, quantification, and
management of risk response measures for all project risks. Risk management
occurs in all phases of the project life cycle.
Project risks are uncertain events or possible situations having a potentially
negative impact (damages) on the total project success, single project
results, or event that may newly cause unpredictable damage. They are
a product of the probability of risk occurrence and the potential damage.
Risks are present in all projects, whatever their size or complexity
and whatever industry or business sector.
Gary Carabetta has taken the lead for us with this topic and we’re
actively soliciting comments, material and suggestions from our membership.
If you have any material you’d like included in our startup
kit please
contact me at the email above.
Project Startup
Every project manager knows that if you get off on the
wrong foot with a project your chances of a successful conclusion are
greatly diminished.
Claire Bateman has graciously offered to take the lead on this topic
for us. Claire and I worked together in Oracle’s Center of Excellence
for Project Management and we can both attest that the single most commonly
requested information from the troops in the field was to give them better
tips and techniques for starting up a project.
According to the NCB (Our own competence baseline) the more relevant
tasks of the start up process are:
• bringing together project personnel
•
securing equipment and facilities
•
setting the project objectives and scope
•
clarifying and designing the basic conditions
•
defining and setting-up the project organization
•
defining procedures of collaboration
•
initial project planning
•
creating the project charter
Obviously those high level topics alone should give a discussion
group plenty to talk about for many evenings. If you have any suggestions
or material that particularly works for you on this topic that you’d
like included in either our startup kit or the World
of Project Management Atlas please contact me at the email
above.
Communication
According to the NCB: Communication involves the effective transmission
of information and the interaction between communicating partners. It
is used to create
good preconditions for the motivation, the work and the decisions of
the recipient.
Communication may take several forms (oral, written, textural or graphical,
static or dynamic) and media (on paper, electronic carriers, verbal or
non-verbal). Communication takes place in conversations, meetings, workshops
and conferences as well as with the exchange of messages, opinions and
reports. An important role of project management is communication within
the project environment (context).
Communication often is ambiguous. It is necessary to interpret the information
for example on the basis of the emitting people. In projects, communications
problems must be detected, analyzed and solved instantly. The ability
to communicate and the competence in communication techniques is an important
quality of managing projects.
Ed Barnicott will be leading this effort. Communication is a particularly
interesting area because the field is so broad. There is currently a
tremendous amount of research being done on social networking and peer
to peer communication as well as in how we tailor our messages to our
audience (social styles and other models come to mind) and how we receive
feedback from our stakeholders, sponsors and team members (active lessoning
and the rules of crucial communications).
If you have any suggestions or material that particularly works for
you on this topic that you’d like included in either our startup
kit or the World of Project Management Atlas please
contact me at the
email above.
Still recruiting Project Team members
Finally, we still need a few more Project Team
members. At the current time we are doing a brief teleconference every
two weeks and our goal is to
keep the effort in the 5 to 10 hours a month range so that even the busiest
project management can find a few hours to participate. Our next meeting
is September 16 at 8:00 PM EDT. If you are interested in joining us contact
me for the teleconference number.
Volunteer to work on our initiatives, or send your
ideas about Education and Learning to us at asapm. Thanks!
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