The View from PMI50: Winds of Change

October 7, 2019 | by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin

Agility is required to navigate the halls of the PMI Global Conference: one moment I am being swept back into memories of my work for the PMI Publishing Division's North Carolina office 25 years ago (a chapter which is, sadly, missing from the PMI history book we all received in our conference packet, along with the contributions of esteemed Western Carolina University professors who launched the publishing program and those of us who formed PMI's first professional publishing staff). The next moment I am being challenged to imagine how project management and the world might change over the next 50 years. Here are a few random insights/mood swings elicited by these mental gymnastics:

The greatest projects of the last 50 years? The Keynote, a quick-change from scheduled Roger Martin to former Fast Company editor Robert Safian, detailed the process PMI used to brainstorm a list, initially of 135 projects, that would eventually be winnowed into the top 10 projects of the past 50 years (which will be revealed later ... stay tuned on Twitter @EditorialPMSol). This involved PMI members, PMI volunteers, PMI leaders, PMI chapters ... you get my drift. As he offered a few hints as to the impressive breadth of the list (the Burj Khalifa, Live Aid, Star Wars) I had to wonder: what happened to stakeholder engagement? Where, in the evaluation of these projects, were the people and places that were impacted by them? The users? The beneficiaries? The communities? PMI makes laudable efforts to be more inclusive but keeps stumbling over its own unseen biases. As do we all.

Poetry meets science in the project management classroom. A delightful presentation on the perplexing quandry of why people have trouble wrapping their heads (and their actions) around the idea of opportunity as part and parcel of risk management, by Dr. David Hillson, led a couple of us in the audience to suggest we invent a new word for risk, one that didn't cause any cognitive dissonance. As a poet and a former linguistics student, I was inspired to suggest to Dr. Hillson that it's the sounds in the words that trip us up. Risk should sound more dangerous than it does ... but that sssss ... a sibillant consonant ... our bodies interpret as soothing. Stay tuned. I'm expecting PMI to announce that risk will henceforth be called "kiki" in the PMBOK Guide. Any day now.

Project managers are smarter than Elon Musk. Working out a case study of Tesla with my seatmates in the Brightline Initiative's presentation, I was impressed how quickly people got to the heart of the matter. All we need is 2 minutes in the elevator with that guy and we could solve Tesla's problems: Focus, prioritize, take responsibility for delivery/implementation success. Boom. Done

Less impressive: presentations based on eight-year-old data. Don't talk to me about what somebody said about PMOs in 2012. Please. Here's my research: You're welcome.

People are hungry to know that what they do matters. That's why Deborah Bigelow Crawford was mobbed after her presentation on benefits realization management by folks wanting more information, templates, ideas, tools. We all need to know we are making a difference. If we don't track benefits, how will we know? Here's the white paper.

Finally: PMI is undergoing major organizational change: the logo is the least of it. As someone who has been a part of it all, first as an employee, then a member, now a conference presenter, I'm proud of the strides they've made. All change is not good change, though. Some of the hallway posters give me pause; can we really be enthused about workplace transformations that make project managers lives less stable? Stay tuned for how "the gig economy" works out for our evolving profession....

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