A friend of mine, working in Dubai, was recently asked by a “professional” project manager to convert his P3 program to Excel to indicate activities with dates and the bars also drawn on the spreadsheet.
The reason given was that it is easier to “read” the program in Excel. Needless to say my friend did not do it. However this incident triggered a discussion re the competency of the current “professional” project managers, which I would like to, continue in this forum.
The request from the PM showed that the PM had no knowledge of the basics of planning – activities should be linked to determine the knock on effect of delays – regardless of which software you use!
I sometimes have inserted a page in my reports to the PM with deliberate mistakes (even a small picture of Mickey mouse!) to test if they really look at the stacks of information that they request for submittal. To date no come back or comments yet – Makes you think!
We came to the conclusion that currently there are very few professional project managers with enough experience to truly manage a project.
I believe that a real professional project manager should have a minimum of 10 years (preferably 15 years) on-site construction management experience; either as a site agent, contract manager etc. before he should be allowed to call himself a professional project manager.
Any “professional” Project manager 30 years and younger in my opinion do not have enough management experience to call himself a project manager, regardless of his titles or courses done – MBA, PMP, MPMI etc.
Let us cast the cat amongst the pigeons and see how many planners agree with this statement
The reason given was that it is easier to “read” the program in Excel. Needless to say my friend did not do it. However this incident triggered a discussion re the competency of the current “professional” project managers, which I would like to, continue in this forum.
The request from the PM showed that the PM had no knowledge of the basics of planning – activities should be linked to determine the knock on effect of delays – regardless of which software you use!
I sometimes have inserted a page in my reports to the PM with deliberate mistakes (even a small picture of Mickey mouse!) to test if they really look at the stacks of information that they request for submittal. To date no come back or comments yet – Makes you think!
We came to the conclusion that currently there are very few professional project managers with enough experience to truly manage a project.
I believe that a real professional project manager should have a minimum of 10 years (preferably 15 years) on-site construction management experience; either as a site agent, contract manager etc. before he should be allowed to call himself a professional project manager.
Any “professional” Project manager 30 years and younger in my opinion do not have enough management experience to call himself a project manager, regardless of his titles or courses done – MBA, PMP, MPMI etc.
Let us cast the cat amongst the pigeons and see how many planners agree with this statement