Day 1 – Futurex Conference 2007 – Elmar Roberg on Project Management

Elmar Roberg, a past president of the Computer Society and current president of the Project Management Institute, discusses Project Management: The State of the Art.

Here is my 2nd video podcast interview with Elmar Roberg.

Elmar quoted Tom DeMarco as saying, “People under pressure don’t think twice as fast.” Bad decisions are made when technology is ignored. Project Management is a young profession. And the first body was formed in 1965, which is incidentally called the Internet. Currently, the Project Management Institute globally has over 230,000 members. Prince2 UK certification with 80,000 practitioners.

There are so many strategies and tools available in project management, so if you just started using what you got, you’ll be better off.

What is a Profession initial education, accreditation of knowledge requirements, skills development, certification licensing, professional development, professional societies – code of ethics – organisation certification.

Competence “basic knowledge set“ you need to know what you are talking about. You need to have appropriate skills with years.

Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister did a series of studies, and one of their key findings in teams was that the strongest person is 10 times more productive than the weakest person. The weakest person from a quality perspective will produce 25 times more bugs or mistakes in their programming.

Capable project managers must be employed, but just how good is your organisation as a project incubator in reference to maturity models?

Elmar is a very vocal speaker, generating great enthusiasm while speaking. I can tell for sure that he is very passionate about Project Management. And I would say that project management should be a compulsory course for all Computer Science and Information Systems students from first year through to third and fourth year. The benefits will be substantial in the long term, with the quality of projects improving over time. This will bring us into a world-class level of competitiveness when we contrast where we are compared to North America, Europe and Asia (especially India) for software development projects.