Speaker: Ed Mahler, PMP

Notes on the meeting, held Thursday Sept. 12, 2002

For those who were there, the season technology opener after the summer recess, proved to be an informative experience as well as a qualifier for continuing education credits for several of the attendees. We were treated to a presentation on "The Nuts and Bolts of Project Management" by Ed Mahler, PMP (Project Management Professional). The meeting was sponsored jointly by our section and the Westchester section of the American Chemical Society on September 12^th and held at the Westchester Community College. Also present were members of the various groups that make up the Hudson Valley Council of Technical Societies to whom invitations were extended.

Mr. Mahler is the retired Vice President of the New York chapter of the Project Management Institute's (PMI) and has his own consulting business devoted to project management and project administration with clients in the financial and information technology sectors. He has a BS in Physics and spent most of his industrial life at IBM, first in marketing and sales but eventually as a project manager. His last IBM assignment was project manager for the transfer and start-up of several of IBM's groups to the new Somers facility in Westchester.

Interest in project management by American business has exploded over the last 20 years as demonstrated by the increase in the PMI membership from 2500 in 1980 to over 90,000 today. PMI is a not-for profit global professional organization, with chapters in the United States and overseas, which conducts educational meeting and seminars and administers a rigorous qualifying examination for the recognized title of Project Management Professional (PMP).

Ed Mahler examined the reasons for this growth in PMI membership and discussed the specialized skills that separate the professional project manager of today from the generic all around manager that most of us have been in one form or another.

To begin with, Ed defined a project as "a unique endeavor intended to produce a product or result at its conclusion". The project manager achieves this by a balance of time, cost and meeting requirement specifications goals that involves people and activities. The mark of a successful project manager is project completion with a generally satisfied internal or external client even though the balancing elements and goals may change over the course of the project. Another mark of the successful project manager is the handling of trouble spots that may anger project members or company management when they are revealed.

Ed Mahler's presentation and hand-outs included techniques that he has developed to track and report the progress of the project's time, cost and requirements elements and to pin-point trouble spots. This is in addition to the computer packaged project management tools that a number of vendors sell. One of his techniques that he illustrated is to determine an "earned value metric" as a mark of progress which is keyed to the achievement of specification goals rather than just the passage of time or dollars spent.

Ed also discussed the differences that a project manager is up against when he/she is an "outsider" as opposed to being an "insider". Examples of "outsider" are consulting and construction companies that provide project management services. As an outsider, managing a group of professional project people, he/she has mostly his own team that is focused on the project. On the other hand, examples of "insiders" project managers are internal company IT and financial departments. Insider groups generally are part of the company structure and may be composed of people reporting to different departments whose management is focused on the company's product or service which may take precedence over the project. These different situations require different people management techniques and motivation skills that are taught at the PMI.

Copies of Ed Mahler's handouts are available by email on request.