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Today, the Project Management Podcast is featuring an interview with Sabrina Mancini from 2EnVision, Inc. We are talking about how to turn the search for your next job into a project. With templates, deliverables and all. Contact Sabrina at [email address removed] to receive a copy of the templates. (Note: as of 2007-04-11, her email is no longer working and we have no newer email.)

Episode Transcript

Below are the first few pages of a computer-generated transcript with all its computer-generated quirks.

Cornelius Fichtner (00:11):

You are listening to the project management podcast. We bring project management topics to beginners and experts. Find us on the web at pmpodcast.blogspot.com or send your emails to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Hello, and welcome to show number 17. I am Cornelius Fichtner. Now this should have been the project management podcast for the 21st of January, 2006. Unfortunately, after moving into my new home and took my internet provider 13 days until the 24th of January, 2006, to hook me back up. So now this is the project management podcast for the 24th of January, 2006. And today you will get to hear the interview with Sabrina Mancini Johnson, about how to use your project management skills in your job search. Let's get started with two announcements and some reader feedback, and then we will move right into that interview. The first announcement is about the schedule. I'm continuing to be a little bit more involved with moving into my new house.

Cornelius Fichtner (01:20):

So the next show is one and a half weeks from today on the 4th of February. So no show this coming Saturday, but Saturday in a week, announcement. Number two is about sponsorship. Does your company have a project management tool, a project management book or seminar to promote, then why not become a sponsor of the project management podcast? Being a sponsor of the podcast will immediately get your message into the ears of thousands of project managers worldwide at a cost that is much lower than what you would have to pay for an ad in a trade magazine. Simply write to me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and I'll be happy to discuss a sponsorship with you. Lastly, before we move on to the main section of the show, I have some listener feedback for you, which was posted by an anonymous listener on the blog on the website. And it's about my review that I did.

Cornelius Fichtner (02:27):

I think it was in a last show about bark world. They had a, it's a podcast called blogworld.com and they had a show on project manager and the listener writes, the guys at bog world are great and I listened to all their podcasts. However, their podcast on project management for web management was almost useless. They were both very flippant and seem to talk more about using Microsoft project than any formal framework or supporting material that is to say risk business cases, communications, contingency, et cetera. The review, the feedback goes on to say that web based projects now make a clear difference to the presentation and marketing of a company. I would have thought that they would have put more effort into this podcast, but it wasn't near Christmas at the time. If the guys at BlogWorld read this, or of course now hear this, I'm afraid, guys, you missed a great opportunity to sing the virtues of proper project management practice and provide some key tips and methods, especially where consultants are concerned.

Cornelius Fichtner (03:42):

That's about this review that I did on bog world.com. Well, to me, I still stand to what I said. I liked the, the feeling of what they did on that show because my experience as a project manager in web development was that it was always hectic. Always things were falling left and right. So the show that they did actually represented my experience, but it seems that this listener here has a completely different experience about project management in web development. I've been out of it for three years, Bre quite possible that things have changed in there. The listener finishes his review by writing, and now comes the usual slap on the back for you. Well done, great podcast. And by the way, it was me who went on about reading out too many emails about how great your podcast is. So you can skip reading this paragraph loops. Okay. I shouldn't have read that. Well, let's move on to the interview then with Sabrina Mancini Johnson,

Announcer (05:00):

The project management podcast feature interview today with the Sabrina Mancini Johnson, [inaudible] incorporated

Sabrina Mancini (05:14):

Ladies and gents today with me, I have Sabrina Manzini Johnson, and we will be talking about how to turn your career search into a project as you project managers should welcome to the show. Sabrina, thank you very much, Cornelius. Since we will be talking about the job search, let me start out by asking the question that everybody hears in their job interview. Tell me a little bit about yourself to ref back. Uh, my name is Sabrina Manzini Johnson. I am a local Southern California native. I have the pleasure of having two small children and also two wonderful Cocker Spaniels who I call family and a wonderful husband. And we live down here in beautiful Southern California at the same time beyond my family. I've been in the world of it, project management for nearly two decades now, which probably gives my years away to everybody out there in the listening world.

Sabrina Mancini (06:12):

You started with punch cards. I started out, uh, just at the time of punch cards. Let's just say I started off in those cold rooms. And so I'm along with the world of project management and being a full time. Mom, I am also actively involved in my civic interests in my community. And that's a little bit about me as a person. And what about to envision inc? How did that come about? Yes. To envision inc. As the name of our recently formed company, we incorporated as a California company in 2004 to envision inc uh, started off as a company in which after leaving the full time project management and it leadership world. I decided to go back to my consulting roots and create a professional services organization that catered to small enterprise project management, uh, projects, um, out of that, um, my husband and I own the company.

Sabrina Mancini (07:11):

So that's where you find the play on the number two. And we wanted to set up a company that was very forthright within the values of integrity. And so we started thinking of envisioning what we wanted to do. And we came up with the name to envision we've since grown into also having a staffing division that caters to project management. And we're enjoying our second year of existence, but only it project management it and business project management. And you'd be amazed how many requests we get for non it project managers? Yes, that's interesting because the PMI IOC here in Southern California, we have about 60% of it project managers. So is it changing again? There's the need going back to more non it projects? I think that there's definitely a, uh, a margin of project management that caters to the back office back office systems, the HR or the ERP, um, somewhat of the training and e-learning as well.

Sabrina Mancini (08:15):

And we're also seeing that there's a different variance and the interest of project managers by County, Riverside County being very strong with more of your manufacturing, semiconductors, um, and also some of our out of state requests that we get that are also, uh, certainly within the world of aerospace and or other types of industries out of, uh, out of state. How far out of state do you go right now? We have extended ourselves into the Texas area and we're partnering with some business in Texas and we're trying to take it slow and steady trying to have our focus more here in the Southern California LA area, but as the needs arise, we do certainly move into that direction.

Cornelius Fichtner (09:00):

Alright. Okay. So that was a little bit about yourself. Let's move over to your templates. Now, when I first met you, that was at the networking evening that we had on November 16th, I think. And you can give a 90 minute presentation titled project managing your career search. Um, what prompted you to choose that topic?

Sabrina Mancini (09:24):

Well, a fellow peer of mine that was heading up the career nights had asked me to be a guest speaker. And, um, she had really kind of asked me to come up with something that was unique after all. It was the closure of this, uh, experience in this career night. And I think that she was concerned that maybe everybody had heard everything already once or 10 times. Um, so it, wasn't a very hard for me to come up with this concept, being that, as I was speaking to people who were perhaps career searching, I really wanted to cater to something that really inherently hit home. And that was a fact that project managers need to address their career search. Just like a project that you construct with an initiation phase and post execution phase. Right. And I thought we don't do this very well as project managers. We think that there's some other magic to doing projects outside of our day to day world, but there is no magic. And so I wanted to show that you can apply the same methodologies we use in business towards your personal career search, or maybe a project that you may be having in some other capacity in your personal life. I definitely found that it was unique. I mean, I was sitting there. I was listening to you. I was thinking, Oh my God, this is so new. This is so

Cornelius Fichtner (10:48):

Different. That's why I ask you to be here now, do you know, do you know if anybody has actually used them

Above are the first few pages of a computer-generated transcript with all its computer-generated quirks. A human-generated transcript is available to Premium subscribers starting with episode 136.

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This show is sponsored by:


Show notes: Listener Harry Fisher submitted an overview of his Groupware Solutions project to The Project Management Podcast and we are happy to feature him today. Listener Michael Witt submitted today's helpful resource and the new year brings several excellent items in the News segment to project managers. The show ends with a review of an episode of Boagworld, where Paul Boag discusses Project Management with Marcus Lillington.

Todays review in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is on:
- Boagworld: Web Design Project Management

Project Management in the News
- PMI seeks input to Practice Standard for Work Breakdown Structures
- CertCities.com’s 10 Hottest Certifications for 2006 (PMP is No. 4) [Update: The web page is no longer available so we removed the link]
- What's Next in 2006: Project Management
- CIO Council releases guidance on EVM plans
- FBI looking to hire IT workers
- Ex-Combatants Train On Project Management

Episode Transcript

Below are the first few pages of a computer-generated transcript with all its computer-generated quirks.

Speaker 1 (00:09): [inaudible]

Cornelius Fichtner (00:11):

You are listening to the project management podcast. We bring project management topics to beginners and experts. Find us on the web at pmpodcast.blogspot.com or send your emails to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Hello, and welcome to show number 16. I am Cornelius Fichnter. Now this is the project management podcast for the 7th of January, 2006. Happy new year to all of you. I am very glad to tell you that today's main show segment comes from Harry Fisher, who is a listener like you, and decided to send me his input. A couple of announcements here to get us started. First of all, uh, we are still on a two week schedule, so there is no show next week. And then there is one the week after that. Also, I promise to you in the last show that today we would have an interview for you on how to manage your job search as a project. Well, I had to change some scheduling around and you will get to hear that particular interview into weeks down the road. And now a word from our sponsor project load is the web based project management tool for your team. As project manager, you create the tasks and assign activities as your team progresses. Their time sheets automatically feed into project reports with task forecasting documents, storage, integrated notes, and over 25 alerts project load is the one tool for project monitoring. Visit us at projectload.com

Music (01:59): [inaudible]

Cornelius Fichtner (01:59):

Today I have one helpful resource from you and this one was sent to me from Mikael Vitz. He is a project manager for sun Frankfurt, and he writes, I Cornelius my project management colleagues, and I are certified as Prince 2 practitioners. We adapted Prince 2 here at sun Microsystems in Germany. In your last podcast, you discussed status reports. I Googled and found a Prince two templates set, including status reports. We adapted these templates within our company, best wishes to California. Well, everybody go and get these templates. They are an excellent starting point for anyone who needs new templates or who is in the process of updating their templates. But even if you're not go take a look, because I'm sure when you look through these templates, you'll find something useful in them and you'll go, Oh, this is, I should include that in my templates as well. Yeah. And that's the only helpful resource I have for you because there is tons of news this week and new year, lots of news. It seems so on. We go with the news.

Cornelius Fichtner (03:21):

So what do you think is going to be big in project management in 2006? Well, that's what the article here in the computer world addresses it is entitled. What's next in 2006 project management, the five biggest project challenges for 2006. This is from the 2nd of January, 2006. And they have five items that they're talking about here. The global teams, of course, we know that that's been going on for quite a while. Then they're talking about moving parts projects that are constantly influx and constantly changing. And of course, rather challenging. Then they'll talk about software development. Then the next one entering number four here is vendor partners. So working on a project management basis with vendor partners, it's going to be big. And finally, their fifth prediction is that project portfolios are going to be big in project management in 2006. Definitely an interesting read this article here.

Cornelius Fichtner (04:33):

What else do you think is hot in 2006? Well, the PMP certificate is hot in 2006 to be precise, precise, it ranks or number four on cert city's 10 hottest certifications for 2006. And this is our annual attempt to predict the certifications that will shine brightest next year. And cert cities is an online magazine for the certified it professional. They write PMI's PMP title also made a strong showing this year, rising from its debut. Stop at number 10 last year. Thanks to in part thanks in part to even a stronger buzz for this industry neutral title within the it community. So if you haven't got your PMP yet, well, think about it.

Cornelius Fichtner (05:33):

Are you a work break down structure guru? If so, then the PMI is looking for your help. This article here is from Thursday, December 29th, and it's titled PMI seeks input to practice standard for work breakdown structure until the January deadline 2006, the PMI makes the latest work breakdown, structure, practice standard available to everybody in the world on their website. Well, you have to sign up and sign 25 disclaimers, et cetera, but you have the opportunity to give your input into the WBS practice standards. So if you're a WBS guru, go and give the PMI a hand And we're ending today's news with two that come from the far side of the news, really the first one is entitled. Ex-combatants train on project management and it comes to us, came to us on December 30th, 2005 from the new times in Kigali, they write child X combatants association in collaboration with the international labor organization is training ex-com battens on project management and design the ongoing 10 day training attracted 20 members from different associations funded by ILO to improve capacity building among youths who were affected by war. Interesting.

Cornelius Fichtner (07:24):

And finally, we stay on the far side of the news. FBI is looking to hire I T workers interviews for a number of it jobs begin next month, that was on the 29th of December. And they're writing here in the computer world. The FBI is looking for a few good it professionals to operate and maintain a robust, secure global it infrastructure environment for the agency in announcement last week, the agency said that it's seeking to fill critical it positions, including computer scientists, computer engineers, it specialists. And of course it, project managers annual pay for the positions range from 35,000 to 135,000 us dollars, not bad based on experience and qualifications with recruitment bonuses, for the candidates who possess the most critical skills. The FBI said, okay, why not become an agent project manager? And that's the helpful resource and news for this week as always, if you want to read up on any of the resources or news in detail, just go to a PM podcast.blogspot.com, where you will find links to each individual item that I have just mentioned. And now the project management podcasts, project

Cornelius Fichtner (08:56):

Management tip of the week,

Music (09:20): [inaudible]

Cornelius Fichtner (09:20):

The project management podcasts tip of the week is divide your projects into phases. Now let's begin at the beginning. What's a phase. What's the definition? Well, the PMBOK defines a phase as a collection of logically related project activities. Usually culminating in the completion of a major deliverable project phases are mainly completed sequentially, but can overlap in some project situations. Phases can be subdivided into sub phase it phases and then into components and so on. It goes on and on and on, but doesn't really tell you what the benefits are of dividing your project into phases. Well, it's quite simple. It makes it easier to manage your project, both planning and estimating because instead of having one large lump of work, if you divide your project into phases, you end up with smaller, more manageable pieces of work. And personally, I like to subdivide these phases into steps.

Cornelius Fichtner (10:34):

So let's say if we're talking about the implementation of some, some software piece, I'm saying, okay, step one in March, we'll be delivering the following features. Step two in April, you'll get these features and may you get those features? So that's, it makes it also much more understandable to the customer. If you have phases and steps, the, they understand that better. If you look at the PMI phases, their official phages are initiation, planning, executing, controlling, and closing. If you look at prints too, it's a bit different. They're talking about starting up and initiating a process planning and directing a project, managing stage boundaries and controlling a stage managing product delivery and closing a project. Those are the Prince two, uh, phases. And if you're looking at general phases, we're talking about planning, analysis, design, testing, and implementation phases. Also allow you to plan your project on a more, um, let's call it as you go basis.

Above are the first few pages of a computer-generated transcript with all its computer-generated quirks. A human-generated transcript is available to Premium subscribers starting with episode 136.

Play Now:

This show is sponsored by:

Today's show contains the following show segments: Helpful Resources, News, The Tip of the Week, two Good Bad & Ugly Reviews, and in the main section of the show we are talking about Project Status Reports.

Two new Podcasts on Project Management are now available:

- The Project from Hell Saga by www.4pm.com
- Estimating Technology Projects by www.ireqwire.com [Update: the template website is no longer available, so we removed the link]

Project Management in the News
- Managing Megaprojects
- Microsoft to Acquire UMT, a Leading Provider of Portfolio Management Software and Solutions [Update: the template website is no longer available, so we removed the link]
- Voice Over Project Management Software Developer Interactive Voices Announces Trial VoiceSuite Account For Clients

Episode Transcript

Below are the first few pages of a computer-generated transcript with all its computer-generated quirks.

Speaker 1 (00:09): [inaudible]

Cornelius Fichtner (00:11):

You are listening to the project management podcast. We bring project management topics to beginners and experts. Find us on the web at pmpodcast.blogspot.com or send your emails to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Hello, and welcome to show number 15. I am Cornelius Fichtner. Now this is the project management podcast for the 24th of December, 2005. Merry Christmas to all of you today. We'll be looking at status reports, what to write in them and what to not write in them. And we also have two reviews in the good, bad and ugly series for you on the show today. And you can consider the second one as kind of a Christmas present, because I will be reviewing two new podcasts for you. That focus solely on project management. Actually it's two and a half new podcasts for you that comes out at the end of the show, but no fast forwarding here to start out the show. Here are a few announcements and items that I want to get off my chest. And we start with a message from our sponsor project load is the web based project management tool for your team as project manager, you create the tasks and assign activities as your team progresses. Their time sheets automatically feed into project reports with task forecasting documents, storage, integrated notes, and over 25 alerts project load is the one tool for project monitoring. Visit us at projectload.com.

Cornelius Fichtner (01:54):

Eric Johnson wrote in and he writes, I graduated from Tennessee technological university with a business M I S degree in December, 2003, I started working like most new it graduates with hardware and PC support and since moved to developing applications with.net tools. My goal is to use this experience in project management in the near future project management just makes sense to me, the more I learn about it and project management, the more I see the similarities between industries and processes, I've enjoyed your reviews and explanations on PM, techniques, events, and your podcasts. In general, I feel that your site references and podcasts are a great tool for me. As I developed my plan to pursue project management as a profession, the reason why I'm actually reading this to you is because of the question which follows. And he writes Cornelius, can someone XL in project management without a PMP certification?

Cornelius Fichtner (03:03):

Or do you think it is a necessary justification to be accepted within the profession? The only reason I ask is it seems that getting a PMP certification is very trendy for lack of a better word. I do not want to jump on the bandwagon just to get a PMP because it's the thing to do. I want to be a successful project manager. If those go hand in hand, then I have no problems putting the effort forth to get one. How do you feel about this? Well, in my view, the PMP certification more or less tells me that you were able to sit down for a four hour exam and answer a certain number of questions correctly, that you have passed sort of a minimal standard in project management to even get to this level, to even be able to take the test. You had to have certain number of hours in project management, certain number of years, you had to have certain training.

Cornelius Fichtner (04:10):

So that to me just tells me where you are at in your knowhow as a PMP, as a project manager in general. It does not tell me that you are a good project manager. I mean, have you ever had a doctor, a medical doctor with whom you weren't happy? Well, it's exactly the same thing with project managers. Being a PMP only tells you that you have some sort of a certification. It doesn't tell you you're a good project manager. Yes, you can definitely be a good project manager without having the PMP certification, but having gone through the training, having taken the test gives you a common vocabulary with me. It gave us both of us, the same common understanding of the tools and techniques and processes. And if I had to choose between two people, one is a PMP and the other one is not a PMP.

Cornelius Fichtner (05:11):

I would probably focus more or lean more towards the PMP simply because I know how this person is supposed to think because of the training that went into him, uh, into, into the PMP certificate doesn't mean that he's the better project manager. I don't really know. I will learn that afterwards. What you will also find is that the PNP seems to be more or less a required item. Now in most of the job ads that you see, PMP is no longer, um, suggested PMP is required. PMP will also give you our RESPECT. It will give you the respect. It will give you the respect from the HR department simply because they are looking for that. It will give you the, from your peers, project managements like myself. And it'll give you the respect of your colleagues at work, whom you work with because they know that you have a certification in what it is that you're doing.

Cornelius Fichtner (06:11):

So there are pluses and minuses as for me, yes, getting a PMP is worthwhile simply because it puts you on a level playing field with everybody else out there. Alright, enough said about whether or not to get a PMP or not, but I found something quite interesting in the Yahoo groups. I, uh, I monitor the Prince two project management Yahoo group, occasionally, and I found the following question from Gregory Tucker. I don't exactly know what Gregory is from, but he writes, I am currently studying for the practitioner exam. That's of course the Prince 2 practitioner exam. I have taken and failed at once. Does anybody know how many practitioners there are in the United States for Prince 2? Eh, doesn't seem very popular right now in the U S but with increasing adoption of ITIL in North America, I suspect there will be a growing interest in Prince too, as well over the next few years.

Cornelius Fichtner (07:17):

Well, Greg, I don't know, but let's put this out here to the listeners. If you are a Prince two practitioner and you've taken and passed the exam, I'd appreciate it. If you would drop me a quick This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., and I can tell you that number, and we can announce that in the next show, you may remember in the past, I have been talking about whether or not listening to the project management podcast would qualify for PDUs. If you are a PMP you're required to obtain 60 PDUs in three years to keep your certification going. Well, I had a bit of back and forth between the PMI and myself. I didn't agree with their initial. No, you can't do this, but I have now received a clarification from Edwin Delgado and he is the continuing certification processor at the PMI. He writes, I do not doubt the content of your broadcast or the work that you must put into your lecture style broadcast that you provide to the listeners.

Cornelius Fichtner (08:29):

The real question is in regards to reporting the PDUs, how would we, the PMI possibly know that they were really listening to the whole broadcast or just part of it? How do we know that actual learning took place? There is such a thing as distant learning, but interaction between the student and the teacher is always present such as in a or over the web. If you were to provide some sort of a PDU code at the beginning and end of YouTube, your shows, who is to say that the people reporting this code listened the entire session or that they were just given the code by someone else in a classroom lecture, there would at least be a person present to verify attendance and verify that they completed the entire lecture, or course there is an actual teacher to student interaction at all times. Okay. That makes it clear. Just listening to the project management podcast does not qualify for PDUs. I would, of course have preferred that the PMI says yes, and that listening to the project management podcast is a qualifying activity for you PMPs out there who are listening to the show, but I can understand the arguments that Edwin Delgado makes, and I accept his decision. And now let us move on to that helpful resources and followed right after that, to the PM news.

Cornelius Fichtner (10:08):

I have five resources for you today, but I'm just going to breeze through to the first forum, concentrate a little more on the fifth one here today. The first two are from the same website. There's a free registration that's required in order to read those. And there are both high level overviews. The first one is a high level overview of project management offices. And the second one is a high level overview of project management methodologies. They're both kind of something that you may want to give to a manager type person who is interested in understanding more about PMOs and project management methodology. And the second one about the methodology is also quite helpful. If you'd like to learn a little bit more about the basics of the PMI methodology, the third helpful resource is titled project management techniques for adaptive action. It is sort of a comparison between agile project management and also heavyweight project management as they call it.

Above are the first few pages of a computer-generated transcript with all its computer-generated quirks. A human-generated transcript is available to Premium subscribers starting with episode 136.

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This show is sponsored by:

Today's show features an interview with Robert Perrine, PMP, ITIL-SM. Robert and I met for this interview following the monthly PMI-OC Advanced Topics Seminar at which he spoke on ITIL, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library. Read up on ITIL at the British Office of Government Service [Update: The web page is no longer available so we removed the link].

Project Management in the News
- Sao Paulo Conference brings together PMI, UNESCO and the Children of Brazil

Episode Transcript

Below are the first few pages of a computer-generated transcript with all its computer-generated quirks.

Speaker 1 (00:09): [inaudible]

Cornelius Fichtner (00:11):

You are listening to the project management podcast. We bring project management topics to beginners and experts. Find us on the web at pmpodcast.blogspot.com or send your emails to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Hello, and welcome to show number 14. I am Cornelius Fichtner. Now this is the project management podcast for the 10th of December, 2005. And today we have a feature interview with Robert Perrine in which we will be talking about ITIL the information technology infrastructure library. To start off the show here are as always a few announcements and things I want to get off my chest. First of all, starting today, we will change to a two week release schedule until about the middle or end of January. This means that there will be no show next week. Then there will be a show. Then there will be no show. Then there will be a show. Again, the reason for that, it's quite simple.

Cornelius Fichtner (01:17):

Next week, next Saturday, I have a birthday coming up, so I wouldn't have done the show then anyway, but, uh, the reason why I'm continuing to do this until the end of January simple, I am buying a new house and, uh, yeah, that's quite a project. It's taken up a lot, a lot of my free time. So I really have to focus on that. And I'm going to change to this two week release schedule, but remember it's only until the end of January, and then we're going back to the one weeks and now a word from our sponsor project load is the web based project management tool for your team. As project manager, you create the tasks and assign activities as your team progresses, their time sheets automatically feed into project reports with task forecasting documents, storage, integrated notes, and over 25 alerts project load is the one tool for project monitoring.

Cornelius Fichtner (02:17):

Visit us at projectload.com. Now let's move on to the listener's survey. Well, I've been making this announcement several times. The listener survey is up on the blog, and if you would please give me your feedback. That would help me a lot. And today I want to tell you what I have learned from this listener survey. There are three items that I would like to read to you from which I have learned, and from which I will be improving this show, of course, I don't know who wrote them because this survey is completely anonymous, but here you go. The first one, I really like this is the best one that I've had on the survey so far. And it reads, please, please, please do not read out emails saying how fantastic this podcast is it just wastes time. Your last podcast went on for five minutes. Just reading out how wonderful it was.

Cornelius Fichtner (03:18):

Okay, it's good. But please move on. We are listening for the content. If you just read out news, et cetera, we can get that from the same sources that you do. It's not very useful. Having said that generally the rest of your podcast after the fire first five or 10 minutes of backslapping emails is great. All right. I agree with you a half way. I agree. Reading the backslapping emails. That's not really all too great, but unfortunately I don't get any others. So if you are out there and you want to write me an email that tells me how great the podcast is, please also include some real advice or maybe something from your experience as a project manager could, I can include in the podcast. So please keep your feedback coming, send me your emails, but tell the other listeners about your life. And I can stop reading all these backslapping emails.

Cornelius Fichtner (04:23):

But on the other hand, I disagree with not reading news because other feedback on the survey told me quite clearly, that news is liked. People are listening to the news that are eat here, so I will continue to do this, but I will try and stop to read the backslapping emails. The second feedback from the listener survey was as follows. Great show, that best podcast I listened to. Okay. Some backslapping here. Once again, I have only one remark. Could you please reduce the volume of the sound of the typewriter between your news items? It really gives me a headache. Apart from that, the sound quality is superb. I've been wondering about that myself, because I personally thought that it was a bit loud, but nobody complained. So I kept it at that starting today, the sound of the typewriter is going down and the third and last feedback from the listener survey is quite short. All it reads is where were you? 20 years ago? Well, simple 20 years ago, I was a 22 year old software developer. And I couldn't have helped you in project management at all. It took me 20 years to come this far. Alright, so much for the listener survey here and now let us move on to the helpful resources.

Cornelius Fichtner (06:01):

I have five resources for you today. The first is of course, connected to the interview that you will hear shortly. And it is the handout from Robert Perrine about his ITIL presentation, which he gave this month for the project management Institute, orange County chapter. And you can download that from his website. The link is of course, on the blog at pmpodcastdotblogspot.com. You can find the other for help for resources at exactly the same location. And the second resource I have for you is an article slash white paper that I found on Gantthead .com and it is entitled the Estimation Blues. And it is quite a nice overview of the troubles that we as project managers run into when we have to estimate and they give you a quite lovely solution there as well. Next, we have 10 things to ponder when implementing an integrated portfolio management application. This is a paper which was written by David L. Davis, a white paper.

Cornelius Fichtner (07:25):

Really, it is a very quick read that you can probably spend five minutes on and you get the gist of it all. And it is an absolutely wonderful start. If you are actually thinking about integrating, implementing an integrated portfolio management application. So this is a really, really nice place to start with this. The next one here is for all you project management beginners out there, and it is called how to teach yourself about project management, without spending any money on training and consultants. This comes to us from the website of Michael Greer and printed out it's about three pages long, and it's a list of ideas, suggestions, and links, where to go to and where to learn about the basics of project management. So this is a really great place to start. If you are looking for something basic for junior project manager, or if you're just starting in project management.

Cornelius Fichtner (08:32):

So check this one out. And lastly, we're going even lower than just the beginning project management. We are going to project management for school kids. Now this one is really good for all you project managers out there who have kids in school and they have a school project coming up well. And then you suddenly realize that, you know what, even though I've been talking in at home about project management to my family for the last, what five, 10 years, it looks to me like my kids really don't know what project management is and how to manage their own school projects, you know, set it up planet, have deadlines, have time assigned to it. This overview is written by Neville Turbit and it gives all you project managers with children out there at great start on how to get your knowhow to them so that they can apply this project management experience in their school projects. And that's about it for the helpful resources this week. Now let's move on to one news item that I have found for you this week.

Cornelius Fichtner (09:58):

Well, actually there were more than just this one news item this week, but I felt that they were also insignificant that I just let them fly by the, this one here is from the 5th of December, 2005, and it is titled Sao Paolo. PMI conference brings together PMI UNESCO and the children of Brazil. Now this is really not all too much to do with project management. And it is more about project managers going out into the community and doing something for the community. At large, you may know that the PMI currently has a conference in Sao Paolo, or by this time it's actually over and at the end of the Sao Paolo conference, which we had a great attendance, by the way, they brought in child hope, which is also known as the children and hope national compare campaign. It is a UNESCO program, which is designed to country amongst other things to contribute to the elimination of child labor. To me, this particular piece of news is just some way that we as project managers, even locally can do something for the community at large. So if you're a member of a professional organization in your area, think about doing something like this, like the Sao Paolo chapter has done and do something good for the community. Don't always think about project management. Think about the community at large as well.

Above are the first few pages of a computer-generated transcript with all its computer-generated quirks. A human-generated transcript is available to Premium subscribers starting with episode 136.