Kari Silvennoinen on Project Management

I spent a week-end in the world´s most beautiful city. You name it: Rome. Rome is just a big breathtaking open-air museum, and an open-air fashion show too by the way.

Here on the picture, you see my friend Kari, from Helsinki, Finland. We were brunching at ´Gusto yesterday, a very trendy place not far from the Spanish Stepsides (the exact address is Piazza Augusto Imperatore 9). Kari provided me with very useful professional insights, and agreed for me to share it on this blog.

Kari is an IT Project Manager at a major Nordic energy company. His projects involve mobile messaging platform implementation and IT risk and governance issues, among others. He is accountable for the project´s budget, quality and is obviously expected to make it match deadlines.

More interesting is the fact that Kari usually doesn´t have dedicated resources: he needs to "borrow people" from different types of IT resources (IT dept., contractors, etc.), people who don´t necessarily have time (or willingness) to commit to another project, and boss. You can imagine how enhanced Kari´s diplomatic & negotiation skills must have resulted! The role of the project owner (the Project Manager´s supervisor, directly reporting to the CIO) is also key: the project owner (who has the hierarchical clout) and manager (who has the execution drive) really need to seduce "client departments" when explaining why this project fits the company culture, goals, but also why the end-customer will benefit from such a service.

No doubt Scandinavian technological leadership and culture of consensus & dialogue help a lot in this challenging environment.

Oh, by the way & before I finish, here is Kari´s daily reading roll:
- Daring Fireball (Apple news, Kari is Mac-addicted)
- Reddit (news)
- Slashdot.org (News for nerds)
- and the late Drunken Blog (about Apple)