The Swiss Project Management Journal
The People Project
tion on the diseases for which the system
was set up. Eventually people returned to
their homes to rebuild or went to live with
relatives elsewhere. Shelters were de-
commissioned, supplies accounted for,
data analysed, and reports written.
Project management literature continues
to highlight the spread of Agile metho-
dology beyond IT projects, but I actually
thought based on my work in other areas,
the concepts of Agile have been absorbed
and documented by IT, finance, and other
traditional project management domains,
not exported from it. My entire career has
been based on delivering on tasks in an
unpredictable environment, managing
risk (not only to the project, but often to
the actual physical safety of the team),
communicating with stakeholders who
could make or kill a project, and maybe
even you, managing multi-cultural, multi-
lingual teams working long hours under
harsh conditions, and constant assess-
ment and re-iteration of a strategy to
achieve the project goal. That this goal
has most often been protecting respon-
ders, reducing mortality and relieving suf-
fering make these activities non-projects
because there was no product other than
survivors?
I often must explain how my work is pro-
ject related, even at PMI events, and I am
not always able to convince people that I
am a project manager. I am often told by
recruiters that even though I am a certi-
fied PMP and have a long work history,
that I just do not have enough project
management on my CV.
A lot of work goes into training, working,
and getting certified in projec t manage-
ment, but this work should make us se-
cure in looking outward to see where our
skills can improve processes. We need to
support areas of work like humanitarian
response, who are bringing on more con-
scious project management training and
implementation of project management
principles and work to make training ma-
terials relevant to a broader field. As pro-
ject managers, we need to look at how we
can spread the philosophy of project ma-
Project Management Institute
SWITZERLAND Chapter
nagement, whether the result is a piece of
software or a lower fatality rate because
good project management is also just
plain good management.
I was once told that a project is something
that “you don’t do for the rest of your life”.
This makes the idea of project manager
as a career extremely ironic. We all need
to keep moving on, growing and making
our corner of the world better. We’re all
in this position because we get things
done. Let’s all try to do a better job of
sticking together. This goes for the IT
project managers who scoff at the con-
fusing and sometimes even bizarre means
of managing projects in the humanitarian
field, but it also goes the humanitarian
7
project managers who may be at the table
next to a table of programmers at a café,
thinking “those guys don’t know what
managing chaos is.”
Tamara Curtini Niemi
2017 Edition