I’ve spent quite a few years not traveling during the holidays. Some of those decisions were made due to happenings at work.

Working right up to and or through any holiday season has revealed one secret – it’s a great time to find time to get some things accomplished.

Contract project managers – you know – those who don’t get paid if they don’t work, can give themselves a little work-based treat over a holiday when employee types leave in droves to get their holiday started early. Most years I noticed that if Christmas fell on say a Friday, by Wednesday, somewhere around 30% of the business employees were gone and by Thursday as much as 70% of the cubes and chairs were empty. I felt like a kid locked in Macy’s overnight!

I found I was able to get a lot of work done. For project managers, having time to review and make adjustments to project plans, to clear out any email backlog, and to ponder any upcoming and New Year’s goals was a real gift. All this, done without the constant interruptions of meetings and the dreaded IMs was almost, FUN! I was even able to brew a pot of coffee and come back an hour later to find it waiting for me – not so on more “populated” days!

In my usual and somewhat contrarian way of doing things, I’ve been able to begin post-holiday work feeling as if I’ve had time to mentally catch up with the life of my projects.

Not a bad way to start a New Year…

From CIO.com…

Worth a look – if you’re even thinking about “looking!”

I had a conversation with someone just recently about PMP Certification. I had it – they didn’t, and they wanted to know if it was worth the effort.

This is a tough answer for me to provide. Here’s why…

Some organizations, including State and Federal employers, started attaching much importance to PMP Certifications about 10 years ago. Some even wrote their project manager job requisitions to demand candidates be PMP certified. This pushed a lot of people into the PMI (Project Management Institute) arena – and made the institute a LOT of money.

Once there you learn there are fees to take the exam, you have to go to a specific testing center to take it, and it is a wide-open test – meaning any and all of the PMBOK (Project Management Book of Knowledge) subjects may be on the test. Some of this was a stretch – even for someone like me who then had over 10 years project management experience. There are also continuing education PDUs required. Keeping these up-to-date can be both time-consuming and expensive. I took it, I passed it – to soon realize I probably needn’t have bothered.

Positions I was then working applied almost NONE of the highly vaunted PMP guidelines and principles. To them, project management meant you knew your way around Microsoft’s Project Management software. I was already doing this on a daily basis. Approximately one-half of the subject matter on the test had never been known or applied in ANY organization in which I’d worked – and the same or less has been seen since.

There are also time-in-position requirements for those wanting to take the test. Allegedly, you’ll need to have at least 7 years of project manager experience. I know of at least 3 people in my former organization who just decided they wanted to be PMP certified, scammed experienced they never had, and were “accepted” into the PMI testing level. For someone like myself, who HAS worked as a project manager, having a web developer who sat in his cube alone and coded all day being allowed to sit for the exam made it somehow less meaningful.

So now we have quite a few people running around the job market with “PMP” after their name who have never worked as project managers but who are apparently good “test-takers.” This explains why many projects are so mismanaged.

My answer to the question then is: Are you really a project manager? Do you even want to be? If you answer “Yes” because you are already in a management position and you accept the responsibility, then go for it. If you are a developer or analyst who thinks adding “PMP” after your name will just make you more money – please find some other certification more inline with the tasks you actually perform.

Employers: Quit being so enamored of certifications and pay attention first to experience. If you know your organization is not using PMI principles then don’t force candidates to have certification for tasks they will never perform. You’ll miss out on those who can really do the job versus hiring someone who is good at taking exams.

This is NOT to slam all IT certification processes. Many are extremely specific to the certification and require, (therefore proving) advanced levels of technical skill. Except for a history of successfully completed projects, the skills of a project manager are not so easy to certify.