Project management education today

A vox pop of educators on the gaps between education and professional project management. What are the gaps between the project management profession and education? What can industry do to close the gaps? What can educators do to close the gaps? What are some of the key challenges? What is the desired outcome of closing the gaps?

Cloud computing challenges project management

Cloud computing is a very broad term for the ‘IT systems via the internet’ that hold the application technologies they run by an external party. Subscribers do not own IT infrastructure and are charged typically on the basis of per user per month.

Adopting cloud computing could have significant and potentially disruptive implications for project risk and governance frameworks in enterprise IT projects, given the current relative immaturity of this technology, lack of standards, and inconsistencies in the governance frameworks.

Project: Building the Education Revolution

When the school bell rang on the first day of the first term in 2011, construction company Hansen Yuncken had the majority of its school projects—halls, classrooms, libraries, offices—ready for students’ use.

The projects in question are all part of the Federal Government’s Building the Education Revolution (BER) program, implemented as part of the government’s response to economic downturn.

The cost of ignoring risk

Having followed the saga of the doomed insulation program, which culminated in the stepping down of Peter Garrett as Minister for the Environment, I couldn’t help but wonder, did the Opposition Leader and the media ask the right questions? The debate that dominated the media and the political landscape centred on whether or not the […]

Project: Telstra’s Broadbanding the Top End

At a physical level, Telstra’s Broadbanding the Top End (Phase 1) project was an impressive engineering feat—800 kilometres of cable laid between Jabiru to Rio Tinto Alcan’s facility in Nhulunbuy across some of the harshest terrain in Australia—and presented an interesting case in good project management versus time constraints and resource requirements. However, the project […]

James Hood, the air force project manager

Group Captain James Hood craves complexity in his projects. That’s what he indicates when he says he wants to get to “a higher level of executive defence program management at some stage”. Following two senior roles on high profile aircraft projects—the AP-3C Orion and the Wedgetail—in succession, it isn’t hard to imagine him on the […]

The changing face of portfolio management

Change is here to stay. Not so long ago, the accepted wisdom was that organisations would introduce change, stop and consolidate, then gear up to change again. Change was a disruption to normal. Today, organisations are in a state of constant change or “permanent whitewater” as leadership development expert Peter Vaille termed it. Today, ‘normal’ […]

An indigenous perspective of projects, community and culture

Any person who comes from one culture and is tasked with working with another should take into account other people’s needs and cultural diversity in a project, says Donald Christophersen of Morning Star Indigenous Inservices. “If you don’t realise that other people’s culture will have a huge impact on any activity, anywhere, how can you […]