I started taking project management training courses that are part of a masters degree program at XIOS today. Part theorie, part workshops, overall a nicely balanced day. There are people from all kinds of industries in the group I’m in (IT, government, automotive, military, healthcare, construction, …), very interesting, looks like this will be a very enriching experience.

These are a few random things I took away from today’s course I’d like to pick out for you:

• in just about all cases, the most important question to ask a client the first time you meet is: “Why are you doing this project?”
• the best ideas in your company will come from people working on the floor
• the profitablility of a project is defined in the bid phase
• a PM should spend the most of his time communicating
• less than 1 FTE PM per 6 project team members is planning to fail
• deliverables should be tangible and verifiable, the decision to accept them should be a formal review with a written document backing it up
• “GBV” means “Gezond Boeren Verstand” (Dutch) and you’ll need a lot of it

The courses are based on PMI which I’m very glad about, it’s a methodology that makes a lot of sense to me. It’s great to have Francis Moeris, a PMP with loads of experience who’s on board of directors of the Belgian PMI chapter teaching the methodology classes. It certainly looks like he’s a very professional and cool guy.