Pmi prep course

So, I’m spending the weekend taking a prepncourse for the Project MAnagementb Professional certification. Which I already hold. 

I’ve gotten number of certs in my life, mostly IT oriented, and a few degrees along the way. Certs are about current practice, while courses tend towards meta-knowledge, and as a result certs expire after a few years, while course learning, though less useful in the trenches, lasts forever. More or less.

Unlike my IT certs, the PMP is one I mean to keep active. 

Why? Don’t I care about the tech side? 

There are two answers to that, both valid. First, well, no, not so much. I love tech, but I love it for what I can get done with it. My career has been a series of jobs where I came, created organized processes using databases and networks and eventually moved on when I got ran out of things to fix, or the company got to big for me to deal with. Typically around the 200 person level. I live for projects to do, new things to build, and messes to straighten out.

Second, tech comes and goes. I hold that any specific cert demonstrates that you’re capable and willing to suffer through learning whatever is tested. The real cert provided is in getting certs. Project management, unlike tech certs, doesn’t get old, but its easy to drift away from the formalized practice in thte day to day press of just getting things done.

By the way, that’s not completely true. PM does change over time, and the current change is to make it more of a real world practice and to embrace “agile” pm, which came out of the software world, more or less where I live. Which is part of why I tend to drift away from the formal practice.

But the formal practice contains a lot of core concepts that apply whether you are using an agile, waterfall, or informal model.

The thing about being a pm, especially in a small organization, and in the end, all organizations down into small units, is that you’re alone out there. Nobody wants to pay for the effort that planning and documenting projects requires. The great irony of good pm is that it takes time and effort and makes projects look easy. Ok, maybe not easy, but hopefully less than a total disaster. So if you do it right, people wonder why you needed to do it in the first place.

Because we’ve lived through the alternative. Though often then projects didn’t.

Since I don’t work for the government, construction, or a large corporation, but typically manage projects that systematize business processes in small organizations. Small organizations almost always think pm is only for large projects where it’s impossible to know all the pieces and the players. What they miss is that all projects are like that, no matter how small, and projects are always in one of two states: managed or out of control.

The former is generally preferred.