Page 101 - Straight Talk On Project Management IV

Happy International Project Management (IPM) Day!

The first Thursday of every November is IPM Day, this
year (2019) it falls on November 7th and it is a great
time to show the project managers in your team how
much you appreciate them.

Private or public sector, commercial or voluntary, no
business or organisation ever initiates a project that
doesn’t have strategic significance! Every project is
designed to deliver value or user benefit or business
change. Projects disrupt markets, change lives and
make a difference, and without professional, competent
project managers none of this would happen. That’s
why IPM Day matters and why you should mark it in
some way if the success of your business or
organisation relies on Project Managers.

It’s estimated that there are between 15 and 20 million project managers (and members of project
teams) working on projects worldwide! To put that into context, that’s roughly the population of the
Netherlands or Los Angeles, or the size of the audience that watched Prince William and Kate’s
wedding on BBC1 and ITV combined! Big numbers – all delivering big results!

Project Management Day itself was initiated in 2004 when Laverne Johnson and Lori Milhaven
teamed up with the International Institute of Learning (IIL). They appreciated the hard work of
project managers and recognised their importance in delivering projects efficiently, on time, within
budget and with all the t’s crossed and the i’s dotted and wanted a way to show it!
Attention to detail is part of our DNA. I just smiled to myself, even writing this I felt that the
apostrophes in “t’s crossed and the i’s dotted” didn’t look right; there was no contraction or
possessive but without the apostrophes, it looked even weirder – who ever heard of dotting an
“is”?! It was the work of seconds to check how that phrase should appear in print, if “dot the i's and
cross the t's” is good enough for Collins dictionary then it’s good enough for me.

This is a tongue in cheek illustration of something that is going on under the radar at your
organisation all the time! Project Managers are crossing t’s (and f’s) and dotting i’s (and j’s) and
they’re delivering strategic goals that affect every division of your business.

This is especially true in IT Project Management.

I often think back to some of the early IT Projects that I managed and compare them to the projects
that I’m involved with these days. I can sum up the difference in one sentence; Back in the day, IT
Projects supported the business, today they ARE the business. Let’s think about that for a moment;
IT is so central to just about every business now, every sector, that without it - there would be no
business.

That’s why we should celebrate the work of Project Managers on IPM Day.

Through Stoneseed’s PMaaS (Project Management as a Service) model, launched in 2011, we
provide organisations with on-demand access to a wide range of professional project talent (with a