Paving a new path for project management education

Dr. M Veerappa Moily, Hon’ble Minister of Petroleum & Natural Gas, released the book ‘Totality of Project Management’ by a renowned Indian Author, Ms. Ruchira Jain, Certified Senior Project Manager (CSPM) from the prestigious International Project Management Association (IPMA). IPMA comprises of 57 countries worldwide and is the only federal structure based organization in the world.

Dr. Moily, while releasing the book, laid heavy emphasis on making ourselves fully knowledgeable on the varied aspects of project management. In his earlier speech, he mentioned that ‘It is imperative for the nation to balance time, cost and scope with no compromise in quality, which needs to be built into our product and services and to meet the diversified expectations of various stakeholders’.

The eminent project management guru, Gilles Caupin of France has following comments printed as part of the book: “The author has done a fabulous job in combining competency elements in contextual, technical and behavioral domains with the project life cycle approach in project management. Combining Power Point Slides with descriptive write up followed by plenty of practice questions makes it easy for readers to grasp the essence of project management. It is highly recommended book to understand the fundamentals of project management”.

The word ‘Project’ is derived from the Latin word ‘projectum’ which implies to throw something forward.

 

‘Totality of Project Management’ deals with the unique approach of adopting the 8 project life cycle approach to management. The eight life cycles are; Conceptualize, Plan, Organize, Implement, Control, Integrate, Delivery and Knowledge Leverage. Very often, we do not find ‘Organize, Integrate and Knowledge leverage’ as the project life cycles. This is unique and the author has argued that unless we organize our ‘Plan’, we would not be so good in implementation. ‘Organization’ is the intermediate stage between planning and implementing. If we plan to deploy 50 welders for the high pressure joints, we would need to organize and mobilize the welders.

The author, Ruchira Jain, is one of the 17 Certified Senior Project Managers (IPMA Level B) in India. As opposed to over 1500 in China. India lags far behind in the total number of Certified Project Managers (CPM) from IPMA. China has 43% of the total worldwide ‘Certified Project Managers’ as against India with almost no share. India has 114 Certified Project Managers at IPMA level C as against China with 18368. India must catch up! Competency assessment based certification is key to success in projects unlike acquiring certification based on only examination, like the one available from USA.  Exam based certification allows you to only demonstrate your knowledge. One should be able to demonstrate the application of knowledge to solving problems in real life.

Exam based certification is like having a drivers license but demonstrating skills in driving comes after lot of experience in driving and right driving. Competency assessment is like showing the skills of driving.

The author has remarkably given all the inputs not only to acquire knowledge but at places, the author has highlighted the use of knowledge in real life situation.

It is a major step forward that a book on project management, written by an Indian author, is unfolding the intricacies of management of projects in a simple and lucid way.

This book is a Must read for everyone who would like to build their future.