Comments on: Bringing Order to Chaos: The Making of a Great Project Manager

By: Project Management Training

Project Management Training — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:21:13 +0000

Been a project manager requires been a detailed person, and most people don’t realize the effort it takes especially if you working across many departments in a company. Often at times, navigating through the political land mines in a company takes a good knowledge of working with various levels of management and employees.

By: Project management Certification

Project management Certification — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:22:18 +0000

Thank you for giving this great information about on PMP and your success, and your suggestions on PMP…

By: Matt Lane

Matt Lane — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:37:51 +0000

Steve,

I appreciate your input. I did put the “pm brain” aspect purposefully last as it was the most important component in differentiating a good from great pm. Good point also about “how to identify pm”. Perhaps I will cover that in a future post or I would also like to hear your thoughts about effective means of identification and selection of project managers. Matt

By: Steve Wilheir

Steve Wilheir — Thu, 14 May 2009 11:27:22 +0000

Dare I speak the heresy that PMP does not MAKE a strong PM, nor does it necessarily indicate one? I’ve seen plenty of paper certs in nearly every industry, from PMP who can’t think their way through the concept of an agile project to the MCSE who can’t troubleshoot a failed router, et. al.

While your introductory paragraph indicates that finding a PM is finished off with a dash of certification, your first item in the bulleted list does not follow suit, with the most important criterion identified first, instead the focus starts on the least important criterion.

I would have rather seen a far more thorough exploration of how to effectively identify that a potential PM candidate has the PM brain, or to identify internal talent who might be suitable to such a role.

- Steve http://Twitter.com/GanttGuru

By: Paul C. Easton

Paul C. Easton — Wed, 13 May 2009 14:25:34 +0000

Good post. I particularly like your descriptions of the “project manager brain.” The best project managers I’ve worked with are pleasantly obsessive, capable of frequently changing their focus from minute details to the big picture, and are great communicators and team builders.

As for project management certifications and accreditations, such as those administered by the Project Management Institute or the APM Group, I agree with you that these are valuable, especially when you are looking to hire a project manager whose background is in a field that doesn’t include project management training.

That said, my experience is that most lawyers and a good percentage of litigation support professionals do not value these certifications. This is likely a result of the general ignorance of modern project management standards in the legal community. Most litigation support professionals, unfortunately, would be better off adding another software certification to their belt than acquiring a project management certification.

It is exciting to see vendors like Fios making an effort to market their project management expertise and qualifications and use this to differentiate themselves from their competition. I think this will help to spread awareness of legal project management in the legal community. Hopefully, as lawyers become better educated about project management and begin to value it, we’ll start seeing project management best practices applied not only to large discovery projects but throughout the litigation life cycle.