A PM’s role is to teach others what PM means as an academic discipline. You can’t change the scope or give us more resources. Before we can begin work on a plan, you must sign it. I received a comment on a requirements document this week from someone asking me to include the project deliverables, budget and schedule. In a requirements document. I’m not usually very abrupt (although my French can make it seem that way! But I did send a clear message back stating that those things were in my project initiation document. If we could agree on the scope of this project, who was running it, and who was paying for them, that would be great. But that’s a different story.
This week, I had dinner with the CEO of a Dutch PM and interim management company. I met him on a Bordeaux training course a few years ago and we have kept in touch. His company is doing well, and we spoke about the usual topics PMs discuss: family, sailing, moving houses. It was great to be able to converse in English with someone fluent. He didn’t have to slow down or use simple sentence constructions so he understood. And dinner out did not involve eating French food. Although the Thai restaurant is right around the corner, the portions were a little small for my liking. The nems au chocolat were well worth the effort.
It’s been a busy week trying to set up a process to prevent us from accidentally deleting countries from our database. I was happy to get out. Although it’s a big phrase, my ‘network’ is important to me because it continually reminds me that being OTOBOS can be a challenge and that there are others out there doing it too. There are some dinosaurs in business that we must work with, and everyone seems to have coworkers who don’t get PM and what we’re trying to do.