The launch of PMD Pro
Please excuse my amateur video skills! This one didn’t come out as well as I had hoped. The transcript for the video is below.
Elizabeth Harrin: Well, good morning. I’m here at the National Council for Volunteer Organisations in London just around from King’s Cross. I’m looking at Regent’s Canal. It’s a great location.
And I’m here because there’s a new project management qualification being launched today called PMD Pro aimed at non?governmental organisations. And I’m interested to see how it fits with the existing project management qualifications.
So Leah, tell me about what you’ve been doing on this project?
Leah Radstone: Oh, it’s actually been really rewarding and I really enjoyed working on this project. It’s been really good because working with the guys, it’s very different to what we normally do.
Although it’s kind of the project management stuff that I’m used to doing, it’s applying it in a very different way and working with people that are very passionate and it’s really good that if we need something reviewed we can talk to people and that everybody is really, really good about kind of getting involved and really helping out.
So we’ve done a lot of that. Obviously seeing the video blogs and stuff coming back from what we’ve actually developed is really great because the stuff that’s actually come back from it is that people have really enjoyed it; it’s really made a difference. So it’s great.
Elizabeth Harrin: Thank you!
John Cropper: My starting point would be that for most NGOs, they don’t even know that professional qualifications exist. So that’s the starting point. And this is an opportunity to get people into professional qualifications and at the same time, to make it appropriate for people because it’s something that works for the sector so there’s a contextualised component. And there’s a professional qualifications so rather than reinventing the wheel, we’ve taken some wheels that already exist which are really good quality project management certifications like PRINCE2® but we’ve bolted on the NGO context, contextual learnings so that people can understand what we’re trying to do, why and how. So that’s why I hope that it works together.
Elizabeth Harrin: It’s been really an interesting morning and I’ve found out that the PMD Pro qualification actually sits a level below PRINCE2® Foundation which it didn’t realise and that makes it much more cohesive with the rest of the project management qualifications that were already on the market.
It’s also not at all PRINCE2® related because instead of Foundation, you can take the
PMD Pro at Level 1 has been trialed in South Africa and in Zambia with World Vision and there were some really interesting statistics given as part of presentation around how much the organisers think this will benefit the NGO community and John Cropper from Oxfam had this to say: “Today is a hundred days since the Haiti earthquake and there are already stories in the media about mis-management. This has so much capacity to improve things.” And I think he is really right, I think there’s a real scope to do something and do it well and this is a really, really exciting thing to be happening in project management right now.
