First of all sorry that I missed one Monday for my blogg, after a few extra posts I needed to take a 2 weeks break. I will come back to at least keep the bi-weekly updates. This blog post I want to use to share some reflections I have done the last 2 weeks.

2 weeks ago I couldn’t write a blog since I participated on passions for projects, PMI’s yearly project management convent in Sweden with at least 500 delegates. I have listened to many very interesting lectures there and can conclude two main things: 1. The project management profession is still needed, or maybe even needed more than ever. 2. Many projects today lack at least one of the traditional characteristics of a project. According to traditional definition a project is any undertaking, carried out individually or collaboratively, possibly involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular, often unique aim. More and more projects today get better defined as a sequence of events, a set of interrelated tasks to be executed over a fixed period and within certain cost and other limitations. When you then even get the target to realize business benefits, actually the project is actually a program – but often not treated as a such. No bad with that, the more we leave waterfall models and enter agility the more we come to program management instead. A bit scary though that a lot of the lektors said that they face some issues with getting the “project sponsors” on board to think in business value realization terms.

Then totally different the end of that week and start of last week where I was in Germany and visited a fair and the factory of my newest business partner who are an innovative developer and producer of heating solutions. They have a great product and sell quite good, so far locally and in some abroad countries, now they want to take the step to the Nordic countries and I will help them with that. Interesting is that such a commodity like heating has created such different market characteristics in different countries. Globalization is on the way even here but this is by far slower than in other industries – you don’t change your heating solution that often and obviously you still trust the same system you have grown-up with. Will be an interesting journey to see if we can transform this market in some way – at least we have high aspirations and a lot of ideas.

Then end of last week ended with the same task that I will do tomorrow: sharing experiences in own lectures. Last week it was about the experiences from post-merger integration projects for the project management community, tomorrow it will be about how to succeed with acquisitions to be shared with investors and entrepreneurs – of course I will tell them that post-merger integration is a very important aspect.

Have a great and successful week.

Yours

Herwig