Oliver F. Lehmann
Oliver F. Lehmann, MSc, PMP, works as
a self-employed trainer in project management based in Munich, Germany. He
volunteers as the President of the PMI Southern Germany Chapter. He is also frequently invited as a
speaker on corporate events and conferences, where he combines intelligent
entertainment with new insights into project management. Having acted as a trainer for over 22
years, he has served major companies including Airbus, Bosch, Oracle, SAP,
T-Systems and many more from various industries. He is also an Adjunct
Professor at the CeDoSIA Doctoral Program of the Technical University of
Munich. His focus is on Situational Project
Management and on the business aspects of the discipline, when project
managers in customer projects are challenged with “Bringing money home with
projects”. |
About PMI and PMP certification
1.How was your starting as a Project
Manager and a Project management trainer?
It was about 35 years ago. I did
actually not just become a project manager. I was an application engineer in
automotive and aerospace projects and was involved with projects in process
engineering and process certification implemented inside manufacturing
environments.
Over time, I found myself sliding more
and more into this role. There was simply no one prepared to spend time on
organizational matters. My colleagues focused on technical and commercial aspects
and left the organizational part for me. I found it interesting and decided to
learn more about it.
Ten years later, I found myself in
the role of a single father with a nine years old boy at home. My project
management job required vast times of international travelling, that was in
conflict with my tasks as a father. After some attempts to reconcile the
different roles, I decided to change the profession and became a trainer. By
that time, I had a focus on the Munich area, where I am living.
The boy has meanwhile grown up. He
has emigrated to the Silicon Valley some years ago and works as a Software
Engineer at Facebook. It was a difficult situation for him, when he was a boy,
but he made definitively the best out of it.
2.What has been the biggest challenge
that you have found when training employees to become Project managers?
Most of my students are experienced
project managers who I help on the way to the PMP certification. But I am also
educating beginners.
The most difficult thing with young
people at the beginning of their career is that they expect a cooking recipe
that helps them gain quickly the abilities of experienced colleagues. Sometimes,
this is referred to as “Best practice”. I do not have such a panacea to cure
all diseases, and as I believe that approaches in project management must be
situationally adjusted to the ever changing situations, I am certain, “Best
practices” in project management do not exist.
By the way, I would not doubt that
there are truly poor practices.
3.Do you think is it completely necessary
to have a special training and/or education to become a Project manager, or do
you think any employee could become a Project manager just with the work
experience? Why?
It takes three
things to develop professionalism in project management: Knowledge, experience
and observation. As a trainer, I can offer knowledge. Regarding experience, I
can do much less. Experience comes mostly from doing the job. I can help people
to contemplate their experience and gain a better understanding of it, but I am
normally not there when they make it.
The same is true for observations.
Observing others is rarely discussed as a means to develop professionalism in
our profession, but good observers learn faster: They do not need to make all
mistakes by themselves, they can learn from the failures of others. I can help
people better understand their observations, but the task to observe will still
remain theirs.
In a complex mosaic of professional
development, the work of the trainer is just a stone. It is an important stone
to make the picture complete and avoid a black hole, but it is not the full
picture. Project managers must go through many learning processes alone, for
others, a trainer is simply needed.
4.What does it mean that a project
manager has PMP certification?
The certification is also a stone
in a mosaic, not the full picture. It is a signal.
It signals that the person is
interested in project management, is motivated to learn and grow in the field
and wants to be part of a global community of certified project managers. This
community has today around 760,000 active holders of the PMP certification,
plus an unknown number of holders of other certifications. This is not a small,
marginal or elitist group, this is a strong force massively shaping the
discipline.
For a recruiter, such a signal is
valuable. Recruiters are interested in people’s achievements, interests and
determination in order to match the candidates they have with the jobs they
need to staff.
I am sure, all recruiters are aware
that certification is a signal, not a guarantee. The chosen person will still
have to show that the signal is a true one.
There are also strong benefits for
employers to get their project managers certified. These project managers will
have a stronger stance in discussions with a credential proving their knowledge
of the discipline, and for corporations in customer projects, it will be much
easier to win good business and end the project with profit.
Good people also rather stay with employers, where they see a potential for personal growth. Investing in certification is a great way for an organization to show its project managers, how much the company values them. It is then important to have a
great trainer, who builds rapport with management and students and does not
damage this investment with incompetence. I am happy to say that we have a lot
of great trainers in PMI, who make seminars a success for all parties involved.
5.What are the keys of success to pass
a PMP exam at the first attempt?
For first-attempt exam success, the
first need is a good trainer and mentor, who helps understand the terminology,
the key concepts and the underlying “philosophy”. And then: Answering sample
questions. Tons of sample questions.
After my own certification in 2001,
I thought that it may be helpful for people preparing for the exam to have some
sample questions. The collection is still online at www.oliverlehmann.com/pmp-self-test/75-free-questions.htm, it was the first free collection of such questions
as far as I am aware of. I have meanwhile replaced many questions to reflect
changes in the real exam. More questions came over time, and other providers also
added great materials. At the end of my page with the 75 questions, you can
find links to their work.
These questions help gain routine
and speed, identify knowledge gaps and measure exam readiness. When you have
done your 35 hours training and have read the PMBOK Guide, answer sample
questions.
6.What do you think has been the
biggest contribution of PMI to improving project management as a profession?
When I began managing projects, I
was not aware that this was a profession on its own. It rather seemed an
inevitable waste of time to deal with organizational, social, and interpersonal
issues, when technical and commercial issues seemed to matter so much more. PMI
helped me and others understand that these undervalued tasks are actually a
core element of the dynamics of success and failure in project management.
7.What kind of opportunities could you
get by joining PMI local chapters and PMI global institute?
PMI and its chapters gave me the
opportunity to sharpen my claws in tasks that I would normally not do in my
normal professional environment. I am a self-employed trainer, a kind of
freelancer, but working for PMI and its chapters, I could engage myself in
teams and grow into leadership positions.
8.Which has been the biggest challenge
as the PMI Southern Germany Chapter President?
Germany has currently four
chapters, and historically, this was a great format, as it allowed us to stay
in proximity to our members. The four chapters have grown, and so has the
significance of project management (not only) in Germany and of PMI. We have to
adapt by developing structures that can ensure impact on national level. In
essence, this means that we have to unify the four chapters.
Not all PMI chapter representatives
share this opinion, so a lot of consensus building in this issue is still necessary.
9.Which will be the new challenges for
the PMI chapters in Europe?
Europe faces an uprise of
neo-isolationism in many countries.
Europeanisation and globalization
gave people new jobs, new products and services and many other opportunities.
Some people have lost more in this process than gained, at least that’s their
perception. We have to strengthen the cross-border bonds in Europe, resisting
the centrifugal forces in the interest of our profession, which is
international, but also in the interest of our cultures, of peace and of our
identity as global humans.
10.What is the future of our profession
in Europe?
I am guessing, but I think, we will
have to look much closer at the different manifestations of project management.
At the moment, we are treating our profession mostly as if project equals
project, situation equals situation. A much more refined look will help us gain
new insights and separate the favorable approaches from the detrimental ones in
specific situations.
For Europe, project management has
the power to strengthen us economically, but also give us means to better help
others. 2017 sees the greatest famine in human history. Project management must
participate in developing responses.
About the books
11.According to your book “Situational
Project Management: The Dynamics of Success and Failure” what is most common issue
by which the companies lose money on the projects execution and how could it be
avoided?
Project management is an open-skill
discipline, not a closed-skill one. The terms come from sports psychology.
Closed-skill disciplines like figure skating are introspective. The athlete
focuses on the own performance that the person trains through endless
repetition and performs in an environment that separates the person from the surroundings
and avoids disruptions. An example for the opposite, open-skill disciplines, is
hockey, where players have to respond to ever-changing situations, and frequent
disruption is the normality, not the exception.
Many companies consider project
management closed-skill, but it is definitively open-skill most of the time.
People involved need situational intelligence to master their projects. Failure
is expensive, situational approaches are therefore necessary.
12.What is the best thing that a
Project manager could do if he/she realises that a project is going to fail?
Identify the causes and find
solutions quickly. Early responses are less costly and the number of options
that are feasible in a given situation goes down over time.
It may sound strange, but
sometimes, running away may be the best when the project manager finds
himself/herself in a clear WOMBAT project, a Waste Of Money, Brain And Time.
13.What kind of tips and new knowledge
we can find in the book “Situational Project Management: The Dynamics of
success and failure”?
First, a typology of projects is
developed, which helps respond more appropriately to the different project
situations that we find ourselves in. To my knowledge, I was the first to
typify projects, and this has value for practitioners as well as for research.
Then, my recommendation is to
remain aware of the degree of predictiveness that a project allows for and that
it requires at the same time, the planning horizon. A situation may be best characterized
by the words of the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, “Wanderer, there is no way,
the way is made by walking”. Then, agile approaches may be best. In other
projects, a detailed and highly predictive plan may be needed to ensure that
resources are booked early, before they get blocked by others, and work is
tasked soon enough to providers, who will need to start tomorrow to have their
results finished when the project needs them.
Another help given relates to the
selection of “Achieving styles” that project managers use to respond to tasks.
This section builds on the “Connective leadership” model of Jean Lipman-Blumen,
a Professor at the Peter F. Drucker School and for many the Rockstar in
leadership theory.
14.How can you identify what kind of
methodology, agile or traditional, it must be used for managing a project?
The PMBOK Guide 5th Ed.,
pp. 44-47, says that there are three approaches to project management:
Adaptive/agile, predictive/waterfall, and between them something called
“Iterative incremental”. I prefer the term “Rolling wave” for the last. Rolling
wave sits in the middle between agile and waterfall, and the PMBOK Guide is mostly
driven by this approach, calling it “Good practice for most projects most of
the time”. I made some research five years ago, which showed that this
statement is probably true: The middle between agile and waterfall is a great
place to start. I recommend to begin a project with a prediction period
somewhere between two and six months, what seems appropriate to it.
When a project manager then finds
that a situation is more driven by frequent change and by “the way is made by
walking”, the project should use shorter predictions, applying agile methods
with prediction cycles of under a month. When longer prediction is necessary,
one should move to the other side.
15.Tell us about the new book you are
writing and when do you expect to publish it?
When I developed my typology of
projects, I found a type of projects sometimes addressed in literature,
training, academic education, but nowhere truly elaborated: Customer projects.
In customer projects, the job of
the project manager is much less that of a change agent or of an implementer of
corporate strategies, the job is to bring money home. I am digging deep into
this field now. It is actually another project management knowledge area:
Project Business Management. It deals with matters of profitability of a
contractor working for a customer, but also with the complex and dynamic supply
networks that have replaced old supply chains and are so hard to understand and
to manage. This goes beyond the knowledge area in the PMBOK Guide “Project
Procurement Management”, which mostly looks at only two parties, a customer and
a contractor, not at complex networks.
The title of the book will be
“Situational Project Management II: Bringing Money Home With Projects”. I
expect publication around the end of the year.
16.Finally, we would like to know how
to contact you in order to know more about the training programs.
Of course: oliver@oliverlehmann.com
By: Lilian Morales, PMP®