Project Management Community
September - October 2004
The Global PM BoK Mind Map
Adapted by Paul Giammalvo, a project management activist in East Asia, to reflect ASEAN cultural value. The Global PM Knowledge Mind Map was developed during an ESC Lille Workshop circa 2002. This collaboration used 48 concepts/topics, derived from research and representing the content of existing standards and guides.
The Lille Workshop Report stated that "Working Session participants, through a carefully facilitated process, developed and agreed on 13 groupings of the concepts/topics that represented significant functions that need to be performed by most Project Managers in most contexts. These are presented as the first level or Units of a proposed global framework of performance based standards for project management personnel ..."
A letter received by the PM World Today from Leslie J. Rider provides some more background on this model...
"This model was the first draft of a model of ‘common subject areas’ from the Global Performance Based Standards for Project Management Personnel project work and that I o highlights the type of range of skills PM people need. The model and thinking has been progressed since that meeting. There are reports accessible from the website of the project and Lynn Crawford is the leader of the initiative if you have further questions.
Global Performance Based Standards for Project Management Personnel
Email: secretariat@globalpmstandards.org
Website: www.globalPMstandards.orgAs an update for those with an interest, we are working on a range of performance standards / qualifications in South Africa and will hopefully have them out in draft format by 3rd quarter of the year. We are part of the global project team and are also constantly trying to locate available standards. There seem to be so many that it is a challenge to find them all!
Lesley J Rider
LJ Project Associates
ljr1@mweb.co.za or office on train@ljproject.co.za"
For more on this project management research read Max Wideman's summary and observation on the development and evolution of project management models over the past twenty years.
The PMPExamForum Yahoo Discussion Group
Discussion Group
The mission of this E-mail list is "to provide a forum for people who are preparing to take the exam to certify as a Project Management Professional. It is open to anyone involved in the process of qualifying, applying, or studying for the PMP test".
PMP Daily Digest
This PM Yahoo Group provides a PMP Daily Digest for subscribers which according to the latest Digest is to:
"Test your project management knowledge and readiness for the PMP Exam with the Daily Digest. The Daily Digest contains a daily crossword puzzle, a daily review question, a daily vocabulary review word, and several times a week review flash cards. All of this material draws on your knowledge of the PMP Exam Guide & PMBOK Guide -- 2000 Edition."
To subscribe go to Yahoo Groups at http://groups.yahoo.com , sign in and select PMPExamForum. Sign up for the Group.
Yahoo List PMPExamForum
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A PM Wiki - The PM World Today Collaborative Initiative
David
Curling
A new web platform called a "Wiki" has been spawned by the active open source community to overcome the static nature of the regular web page with a dynamic approach that allows one to enter the web page with both comment on the content and a capability to write directly on the web page and even change the written text. In essence the web page becomes a whiteboard or bulletin board where many can collaborate and have write permission not only in a comment form but actually write on the page and edit existing text..
This new technology is called a Wiki and allows collaborators to dialogue and jointly develop project management documents in virtual space. The goal of the "Wiki" is to solve one of the work place's vexing problems, that is, how to have teams collaborate and communicate better electronically. A Wiki is a type of Web site that many people can revise, update and append with new information.
The most well known Wiki is Wikipedia. This free online encyclopedia, compiled since early 2001 by volunteer writers, has thousands of entries, making it bigger than any other encylopedia.
Importantly a Wiki can gather, in one place, the data, knowledge, insight to form a living document as it can be changed constantly. No elaborate programming skills are are required. Users of a Wiki can simply click an "edit" button to add comments or make changes directly to the text.
Most of the current Wiki software development has been led by noncommercial, open-source efforts such as TWiki (www.twiki.org) whose software has been downloaded by thousands of people who then install as online web sites or within company LANS. There are two Twiki tutorials available for online reading or downloading from the TWiki web site.
This seemed to me to be the essence of loss of control in the operation of a web site. As I have never been enamored by online bulletin boards this was to my mind the most way out concept believable to online development of systems, documents or even knowledge data bases. There are currently a number of commercial collaborative web platforms where virtual project management teams can carry out the work of a project but are essentially file management systems.
The Wiki poses an interesting people dimension in the matter of document grammer, style and presentation. It seems to me that the whiteboard approach is OK but that a facilitator or guide is mandatory to the successful completion of a document's page. Apparently this is not the case and reports from the Wikipidia people suggests that these normal publisher and Editorial inputs are resolved through close collaboration.
While it seemed a novel idea for PM online collaboration I was not clear on how it could be of use to project management practitioners. Rainer Volz offers some understanding of this dilemma in his article "ProjectWikis" in the Education Section.
As a matter of intellectual curiosity of how this new technology might be of some value to virtual project management and those instances where global collaboration is needed we pursued some research into the selection and test install of a number of Wiki applications. We had four likely candidates. the pmWiki, the phpWiki, Drupal and TWiki. We chose both the Drupal and TWiki as the most suitable for our immediate learning purpose. The TWiki is a free open source, PERL script driven application, that is experiencing world wide popularity and use both for corporations and personal web presence use. The Drupal is a free Content Management System (CMS) from the open source community and is a simple Wiki concept application, with a intuitive home page.
The TWiki offered the most flexibility in collaborative operations with ability to jointly develop PM books, pages accompanied by direct comments. A number of separate collaborative projects can be accomodated to run at the same time. The "PM books" could be any prospective document. The Drupal the simplest to learn and an application that was programmed as a web application as opposed to the TWiki which seemed more at home in a company LAN..
Ranier Volz a global expert on virtual applications and our Columnist on virtual project management web platforms has a web site that is a wealth of information and observation on the collaborative web platform.
The Wiki is a different breed of web platform. While there are commercial Wikis available we used those developed by the open source community that keeps the Linux operating system free from commercial,proprietary and artificial constraints of intellectual property regulation. Rainer has worked with us to facilitate the enabling of a PM Wiki for the PMFORUM - The PM World Today Collaborative Initiative that gave us the opportunity to test and learn more about the Wiki web technology..
The The PM World Collaborative Initiative was the result of our research. It is a dynamic system which through a browser-based interface a collaborative project management group can create, revise and maintain documentation. Our immediate purpose is to configure this web based tool, the PM Wiki, to provide a free information exchange resource for the PM community in the interests of advancing a global project management discipline. We are on the Wiki learning curve and will report more in the next PM World Today.
David Curling
Editor