Training - Literally

Yesterday, I was training - from Philadelphia to North Florida. The day before yesterday, I sat myself on the couch in front of my laptop and compared the costs of traveling from my apartment outside Philadelphia to my wife's home in Jacksonville, that is, jet vs. train vs. bus. Although the bus is cheapest at around $130, it's not all that much different from Amtrack service via the Silver Meteor at $157. On short notice they both beat out flying any airline by a wide margin. I bought a one-way train ticket and am here in Jacksonville today writing this blog entry after a overnight train trip that was both adventure and relatively relaxing.

To begin the trip, I packed my laptop, a change of clothes, toothbrush and prescriptions into my rucksack and walked the mile to the River Line light rail that connected me to the PATCO train to Philadelphia, and from there to the subway to 30th Street Amtrack station where I waited about two hours inside that cavernous facility for my train departure at around 5PM.

The train to Florida was on time. The 30th Street station is a hub for all the Northeast corridor trains, including the Acela's bullet service between Washington, DC and Boston. From my frequent glances at the arrivals board, I gathered that unlike most projects, most trains ran on schedule. Although the station's crowd density was nowhere near what I've experienced at Grand Central in NYC, the riders queuing for the commutes stretched to respective 50 yard lines.

Many of the riders queuing wore suits that had to be in the $1000 range. The management jobs are obviously out there. Are you a Project Manager wanting to prove your competence and wear that Brooks Brother's suit with confidence? Get certified. A frugal way is to buy the PMBoK and get my PMP Exam Simulator for Windows. A guaranteed pass on the first try if you answer all the questions in the Sim.

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All you need to pass:

experience as a Project Manager

a few reads of the PMBoK

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Take it from me: C.Rich Munyan, MBA, PMP

The Iron Man PMP

After watching "Iron Man 2" twice at the AMC Max Mall Movie, I think that Tony Stark could have used a PMP certified assistant instead of the obvious non-qualifications of Pepper Potts. Pepper has a great figure and long legs and a sweet demeanor, but no technical acumen for running a project the complexity of developing, 'er, redeveloping Iron Man 2 and the power source that will ultimately save Tony Stark's life and give him the ultimate power he needs to overcome the bad guy who ripped off his father's Iron Man suit design.

A plan would have helped, along with a QA, risk management and so on, ala PMBoK. Not familiar with the PMBoK?

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Niching

A shorthand definition of niche is how an organism makes a living. The ecological niche describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors. Is this paradigm applicable to project managment?

The niche concept was popularized by the zoologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson in 1957. Hutchinson wanted to know why there are so many different types of organisms in any one habitat [a project - bear with me, please].

The full range of environmental conditions (biological and physical) under which an organism can exist describes its fundamental niche. As a result of pressure from, and interactions with, other organisms (e.g. superior competitors), species are usually forced to occupy a niche that is narrower than this, and to which they are mostly highly adapted. This is termed the realized niche. The ecological niche has also been termed by G.E. Hutchinson a "hypervolume." This term defines the multidimensional space of resources (e.g., light, nutrients, structure, etc.) available to (and specifically used by) organisms. The term adaptive zone was coined by the paleontologist, George Gaylord Simpson, and refers to a set of ecological niches that may be occupied by a group of species that exploit the same resources in a similar manner.

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