Meeting Greg Balestro, PMI CEO

“It’s really an exciting time for project management despite the economy,” says Greg Balestrero, CEO of PMI, as we sit around the board room table. “There’s a shift towards executing that we haven’t seen before.” It’s the final day at the PMI Global Congress in Orlando, and Greg seems very happy about how the event has gone. The leadership meeting attracted over 700 delegates before the Congress proper kicked off. And for those that haven’t made it to Florida, PMI is making an effort to get out to them.

Greg says that PMI reaches 2500 leaders face-to-face per year, and that this year they have really ramped up their support in Latin America. They have provided a marketing portal so that PMI groups in Latin America can design materials in Portuguese and Spanish. There is are also high-profile local events and PMI sends global Board members to speak at these. “The economy in Latin America has done very well through this recession,” Greg says. “There’s been an increasing demand for project professionals.”

And project professionals with a variety of skills. Greg believes that Agile has become more of a commonly accepted practice, things have been creeping into PMBoK. Certification is something that he feels very passionate about, and we discuss the role that PMI is playing on the ISO committee looking at an international project management standard. Greg seems confident that PMBoK processes are broadly in line with what ISO is developing, and I detect a feeling – a hope? – that implies that the ISO standard will be the PMBoK by another name.

Regardless of what happens with ISO, Greg feels strongly that project management education isn’t up to scratch. Universities aren’t offering a breadth of courses that the discipline needs, and companies are having to design their own internal certificates to make up the shortfall, especially for the most senior, experienced professionals. It’s a good point, but while that might be the case for Siemens and IBM, but smaller companies can’t afford to invest in that type of programme, and they won’t have the skills in house to assess or promote to that level. We ask Greg if PMI is going to fill the gap and come up with an advanced practitioner certificate.

When PMI produce a new certificate, he explains, they go through a role delineation study, looking at what jobs people do and mapping them to the type of certificate they need. About 10% of PMI staff have PMI certification as CAPM or PMP – but not Greg. It’s not relevant to his role as CEO, he explains, but everyone in the organisation does a basic project management course. In the last role delineation study they found that there was a role requirement for a project manager, and an advanced level role for carrying out complex projects that could be broken down into other projects:  and they mapped this role to PgMP. “The ah-ha moment was the risk professional role,” says Greg, and PMI created a risk certification to match that.

The next ah-ha moment appears to be green project management. “Project mangers are not only going to be held responsible for maintaining an ethical supply chain, they’re going to have to be vigilant,” Greg says. “For organisation sustainability you have to be a better global citizen.” Being an ethical, green project manager is the next trend. You can’t wait for someone to give you a checklist of what to do to ensure your project is green – you need to be forward thinking and start doing it now. “Cloud computing is the big buzz,” Greg adds. You need to be ethical when you buy space in the cloud. “Where is it hosted?” It’s not just sweat shops for products any longer: the ethical supply chain affects all parts of the project.

For all the talk about green project management, there is very little for the ‘average’ project manager to go on, and not a lot happening at the Congress in the ‘advanced’ track for senior project managers. That looks like it will change in 2010. “We’ll have a research track in our conference next year,” Greg says. I’ll be looking out for that next October in Washington – maybe it will address some of the questions of advanced project management education and where next for green project management.

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I should add, in the interests of transparency, that I attended Congress as a guest of PMI. And that the wine I won from Greg was top notch. Thanks, guys!

You can see the room where we interviewed Greg (and a glimpse of my new lovely laptop bag) in the Conference Highlights video which will be here next Monday.