#PMFlashBlog - Project Management Around the World - Los Angeles, California - USA

#PMFlashBlog – Project Management Around the World – Los Angeles, California – USA

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I was honored to be invited to a 2nd round of flash blogging with my fellow PM bloggers, but the dunce that I am, I misinterpreted the time to post!  Though I have managed many global projects, I still can’t get out of the time zone locality of my thinking.  But maybe unconsciously I wanted to miss it so that I could be fashionable late and indulge the inner exhibitionist that I am so as to “flash” myself to the world!  With that being said, I think the idea is to post about what we are each seeing with respect to where we are at in the world related to project management.

Fortunately for me, I’m a board member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Project Management Institute and this allows me to network with a lot of fine project managers in the Southern California area and Los Angeles in particular.  What I am finding is that though the economy has picked up, there are still a lot of highly skilled and qualified people out of work  and even if they are in a full time position, are not feeling as though they are using the full potential of their abilities.  Therefore, in my view, these tenets should be the driving force for those in the PM profession going forward:

  1. You need to become more of a project-based entrepreneur or intrapreneur if you remain as a traditional full-time employee.  You need to manage your projects like a business, lead like an entrepreneur and create and craft your career like an artist.
  2. Which leads to my next point in that you need to “manage well, deliver anywhere” and create a  “truly portable, cross-industry and project based career platform that will never get obsoleted.”
  3. You need to get out of your binary mindset and quit compartmentalizing your knowledge and skills as being “soft” vs. “hard”, “technical” vs. “business”, “analytical” vs. “synthesizing”, etc.  You need to be both broad and deep or a “deep generalist” and have an interdisciplinary mindset.

Having made the jump from a full-time employee to a full-time, independent and self-directed project-based professional last year, I can say that I will never miss the cubicle life and love the flexibility of defining and determining my own career on my own terms and taking on work as projects.

This to me is what managing and leading projects is really about.  A big thanks goes out to Mark Phillipy for setting this up and inspiring all of us!

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