Creating internal project management communities: experiences from government and private sectors.

The experience from the European Commission was very interesting, the management does not fund the project management community although agree and support that some volunteers organize meetings, presentations and conferences to spread and discuss the PM subject.

They arrange the conferences and debates for lunch time and the European Commission project managers, most of them located in Brussels and only a few in Luxembourg, listen to the speaker while eat their sandwich. With such weak support, the community is growing and maintaining their activity, actually, it is really a community as it is always optional for the members to join or not every event. If at some point, there is not enough attendees, the community will be discontinued but, from Robert Maclaren's words it is far from happening as their colleagues are contributing more and more to the community of practice

The second speaker, Michael Söderberg, told us how Siemens in USA has created a community, PM@Siemens with a completely different approach. In this case, as the company is project oriented, being part of the community is not an option for the project managers, they have to. On the other hand, they are geographically distributed and meeting all of them together is almost impossible. They created a website, using sharepoint to share best practices, methodologies, share experiences and so on. They also have periodic video and audio conferences. So far, they are also doing well.


Notes from the PMI Global Congress EMEA Milano - 2010.
Presentation given by Robert Maclaren and Michael Söderberg