Dr M Veerappa Moily, Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas, recently launched a book titled Totality of Project Management written by Ruchira Jain, certified senior project manager (CSPM) from International Project Management Association (IPMA).
Dr Moily, while launching the book, laid heavy emphasis on making ourselves fully knowledgeable on the varied aspects of project management. In his earlier speech, he said: “It’s 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”.
Gilles Caupin, an eminent project management guru from France, has commented as part of the book title: “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’s highly recommended book to understand the fundamentals of project management”.
Totality of Project Management deals with the unique approach of adopting the eight project life cycle approach to management. The eight life cycles are conceptualise, plan, organise, implement, control, integrate, delivery and knowledge leverage. Very often, we don’t find organise, integrate and knowledge leverage as the project life cycles. This is unique and the author has argued that unless we organise our plan, we would not be so good in implementation.
Organisation is the intermediate stage between planning and implementing. If we plan to deploy 50 welders for the high pressure joints, we would need to organise and mobilise the welders.
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’s 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.
IPMA comprises of 57 countries worldwide and is the only federal structure based organisation in the world. Jain is one of the 17 CSPM (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 per cent of the total worldwide CPM as against India with almost no share. India has 114 CPM at IPMA level C as against China with 18368.
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.