PMIWDC

Leadership Trip: PMIWDC to Team India 
A.Chris Fristad, March 2007

As a chapter and component of PMI our two primary missions are to provide service to our members and to promote the profession of PMI.  The Chapter to Chapter Program is one of the many ways that your Board is meeting these goals.  As a part of this program, Team India requested that we, as one of the more mature and successful chapters of PMI, send someone over to share with their chapter boards how we were managing the chapter.   One of the requirements was that the individual sent be a present or former board member and preferably a chapter president.  Well, I got elected.

Vivekananda Rock Memorial is a sacred monument and popular tourist attraction in Kanyakumari, India. The memorial stands on one of two rocks located about 500 meters off mainland India's southernmost tip. It was built in 1970 by the Vivekananda Rock Memorial Committee in honour of the visit of the great spiritual teacher Swami Vivekananda to Shripada Parai during the month of December 1892 for deep meditation and enlightenment. 

He swam to this rock and meditated about the past, present and future of India. It is said that he attained enlightenment on the rock, and henceforth became a reformer and philosopher.

I left on the 24th of March and arrived about midnight of the following day.  Over the next eight days, I delivered eight presentations in four different cities; Mumbai (Bombay), Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Trivandrum.  The four chapters I visited asked if I would mind giving a presentation to their chapters, as well as their boards, as long as I was going to be in the area.  The presentations I delivered for their boards was on how to manage a PMI component, to their members I delivered a presentation on “Teamwork, Leadership, and Communications.”

With Thomas Friedman’s Flat World, the playing filed is even and the trade has increased significantly between India and the US.  The IT industry is booming.  As a result, the demand for leaders and project managers is also booming.  The seven PMI chapters in India are providing the foundation for the development of both leaders and project managers.  In fact, the President of India was the keynote speaker at a recent symposium held by the Pearl City Chapter (Hyderabad) of PMI, where he stressed the need for developing leaders and the value of Project Management.

As I met with each of these groups, we both shared what we were doing with the component management and the different initiatives we had going.  I picked up some new ideas that I will be sharing with our board and they took some ideas from us.

How does this help serve our members and promote the profession?  Well, as far as serving our members, many of us are already doing some of our business with India.  To the extent that we can assist them in developing good project management practices it will make the partnerships we are forming more productive.  To the extent that we can help their components to mature more quickly from lessons learned, the sooner we will reap the benefits of raising the awareness of the importance of Project Management as a profession.

Team India will be sending someone over to the US in the near future to share with us as well.  In fact, when I was in India, I met with a representative from ISRO (India’s NASA) to see if we could get someone to speak about their Lunar Mission.  Because of scheduling issues, that will not happen as soon as we would have liked, however, we have high hopes of getting someone from ISRO in the future.

I cannot express enough my appreciation for the most gracious and accommodating hosts from each of the chapters I visited.  These individuals invited me to their homes and arranged for me to see many wonderful sites in the short time I had for sightseeing.  It would take too much space here to mention them all and this is not a travelogue.  I will mention that we visited the tip of India where we saw three oceans: The Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of Bengal.  The statue in the picture was covered in water when the Tsunami hit.

Next steps, continue communications and sharing.  Mr. Saji Madapat MBA,CSSMBB,PMP, “ TEAM India” representative and PMI Component Mentor, Asia (Region 9) has made a presentation to our chapter in June of 2007.   We will also make every effort to connect with our sister chapters in India at future leadership meetings and conferences.