PM Scene: Faces and Places
March - April 2005
DAVID CURLING: PROJECT MANAGEMENT PIONEER OF THE MONTH
PM WORLD TODAY HONORS FOUNDER AND FORMER EDITOR,
DAVID CURLING, AS PM PIONEER OF THE MONTH
The founder of PMFORUM clearly deserves the high recognition his peers have afforded him: Fellow of the Association for Project Management, Fellow of the Project Management Institute, and recipient of the Outstanding Performance Award of the Performance Management Association of Canada. He has had a distinguished career as a professional soldier, systems engineer, test and validation engineer, logistics engineer, project manager and senior public servant.
However, David Curling is perhaps best known for the creation of PMFORUM. Realizing the value of his personal library early in 1995, he made it publicly available through a fledgling technology known as the internet. Today, pmforum.org is one of the largest and most popular sites in project management, and PM World Today boasts a subscriber list representing every part of the world.
David graduated from Mc Gill University, Montreal, Canada with a Bachelor of Engineering and attended a number of Staff Colleges notably the Royal Military College of Science. He was awarded a Canadian Forces (CD) decoration. He received the Outstanding Performance Award of the Performance Management Association of Canada. He is a Certificated Project Manager, Fellow of the Association for Project Management and Fellow of the Project Management Institute.
David has extensive knowledge and experience in the formal management of projects in a variety of industrial and government settings. He has been both a manager and consultant to projects involving multi-disciplinary teams from a variety of companies working in a number of different countries. He has an in-depth understanding of the application of appropriate tools and techniques, experience in the management of people and organizational cultures, together with project management issues.
He has organized, coordinated and led project teams dealing with the resolution of project management problems in technical requirements definition, data systems, logistics support, test and evaluation, risk analysis, master scheduling, acquisition planning and has been active in all phases of a number of complex, high technology programs. These range from technical equipment, public infrastructure to information technology and acquisition projects.
David has had 30 years of "hands-on" project management experience in Canadian Industry and Public Service with post-graduate teaching experience. David is active in the Project Management Institute of North America, the Project Management Institute Canada and the International Project Management Association (Europe).
David is a Member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of
Project Management. He is currently involved in the development of an international
project management competency standard and in the application of the systems
approach to training (SAT). He has written extensively on the field of project
management and is a lecturer in systems management, leading project management
workshops on a private and public basis for the past twenty years.