Project Management Speed Mentoring

Posted on | November 3, 2009 | Author: | lindsayascott | No Comments

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Last Wednesday night I went along to a North West Branch Meeting of the APM (Association for Project Management) for a Speed Mentoring evening. The night was hosted by the Inspire team – this is the APM group that is specifically for people either relatively new to project management or a recent graduate in project management. Normally they hold meetings for their own members but on Wednesday night they wanted to bring experienced project management professionals and graduates together.

So, most people will be familar with the concept of speed dating (3 minutes to find out something from the person across the table from you…..) In this event there were nine tables that covered the APM’s specialist interest groups:

Contracts and Procurement
Planning and Earned Value
Governance
Women in Project Management
Risk Management
Benefits Management
Programme Management
People
Project and Programme Assurance

On each table was a representative from the SIG group or at the very least an experienced project professional with lots of experience in that particular area. I started off with “Women in Project Management” and shook hands with Nicola George, a recent member of the WiPM group. My opening question was “Why do we need this group?”. The conversation centred around Nicola’s more personal reasons for joining the group rather than a militant debate about how women are underrepresented etc etc. Nicola works within the construction industry and she is looking for a female mentor who could assist and guide her through the more softer skills needed to hold her own in this sector. She already has a male mentor in her place of work but felt she needed a balanced approach and signed up to the group to seek out an ideal mentor.

So personal stories and opinions were certainly shared during the event but there were actually more “mentoring” styles – practical help, hints and tips – when I visited other tables.

John Meakin was focused on Project and Programme Assurance, John’s experience has a senior project manager (within the construction industry again!) was excellent. Now, assurance to me has always been a bit of a yawn subject. Working in professional services, assurance was always lumped in the quality camp, something that was always a bit of a tick in the box exercise after the event rather than anything proactive or useful. I was surprised to learn quite a lot from John in that short 3 minute slot, about how assurance is actually more synonymous with risk management and starts at the beginning of the process (in John’s business that means at bid/tender stage) before the project manager even gets involved in the project. I guess for me, the speed mentoring was actually more about hearing about other industries and how project management is practiced. How can learnings and experiences from one industry be translated to another?

The Benefits Management SIG is still new (only formed 3 months ago) and is deemed to be one of the hot topics of project and programme management at the moment. I left a query with the mentor to check with the SIG group, I wanted to know how practical the group is – do they share tools, processes, tangible things that practitioners can use in their daily work. I’ll let you know if I get a response!

That was one of the negatives of the event for me, most of the table hosts were from two major organisations (construction and engineering based) with the odd one or two independents. The knowledge and practice shared were a great insight to those industries but attendees with a wholly different working environment could have struggled to see the real value (or what can I take away from that and really use)

Putting all that aside it was a great way to network. Sometimes going along to these events, it can be difficult to get around most people and have a chat about what’s going on in their world of project management. This structure was a great way to get people chatting and really that’s what it’s all about. I hope the APM take the idea, finesse it a little with a wider spread of mentors, and get people sharing thoughts, ideas, opinions and best practice.