OTOBOS and nems au chocolat

Part of a PMs role is to educate our colleagues in what PM means as a discipline. That you can’t just change the scope and give us no more resources. That you have to sign of a plan before we can start work on it. I had someone email me this week with comments on a requirements document asking me to include project deliverables, the budget and the schedule. In a requirements document. I’m not usually abrupt (although my French tends to make me come across that way!) but I sent a clear message back saying that those things were in the project initiation document. Or would be, if we could agree on what this project was supposed to do, who was running it and who was paying for it. But that’s another story…

I had dinner this week with the CEO of a Dutch interim management and PM consultancy company. He and I met on a training course in Bordeaux a few years back, and have stayed in contact. His company is doing OK, and we talked about all the normal things PMs talk about: family, sailing, moving house. It was great to have a conversation in English with someone fluent and not have to slow down or use straightforward sentence construction so he could understand – and dinner out not eating French food. The Thai round the corner from the office is really good, although I thought the portions were a bit on the small side. The nems au chocolat were worth it though.

It’s been a hectic week (trying to put a procedure in place so we don’t accidentally delete countries from our database any more) and I was pleased to get out. My ‘network’, although that’s a bit of a grand phrase, is important to me as it constantly makes me realise that being OTOBOS is a challenge, and that other people are out there doing it to. And that there are some real dinosaurs in the business world that we have to work with like it or not – everyone seems to have colleagues who don’t understand PM and what we are trying to do for them.