Project management in the UK today is, if you look back 10 years, far more recognised as a term

We are actually finding that there is more interest in behavioural sciences and social sciences that go onto what I might characterise as the bread and butter building blocks of basic project management. So, it’s project management plus it’s project management made to work – made to relate to human beings rather than to big processes.

How to shape your projects via an APM special interest group [SIG]

One of the best ways to engage with the work that you do and shape the work that you do is to become an active volunteer member of the APM and you do that generally by joining a SIG [a Specific Interest Group] and following what it does.

The payback both for individuals and organisations is that they are there when we are at the coal face cutting out new text books, new handbooks and new ways of doing things. And we are doing that amongst people who all share the same passion, interest, drive, and incentive for doing project management well.

The smart organisations send their people along to work, sometimes with their competitors, but it is a very good environment to share information without thinking you’re selling off trade secrets. What comes out is normally the very best because it is a broad consensus-based view, of our view on the subject.

The world we are living in now is not the world that we were in 5 years ago and things are going wrong. I think that every project which is created to change for the better has the project professional there. We need to make sure that the project professional is of the best quality is competent and is impartial in the professional sense. And so is trusted, full or integrity, reliable. It’s what we want project managers to be.

Why partnering with Deltek?

I think that they have always been consistent in their approach. I can say that because they have been around for more than long enough to demonstrate that to me personally, and organisationally, and in their support of the APM. They are long-standing corporate members of the APM as well. Quite often, that support is given, with almost no expectation other than support of the profession, and the idea and the community.

So in that sense I support them because they are good individuals but again, individuals that reflect the culture and ethos of the organisation. It seems to me that the organisation is prepared to change and it also seems to me that the organisation is prepared to listen and in so doing bring about change which is good.