Excellence in Projects

Informal discussion with Michael O'Connor, Senior Research Program Director of Medtronic about the future of project management and their case study featured on the book PM Next Generation, published by Wiley.

Informal discussion with PMO Global Alliance and PMU (Bridge Conference) about the future of project management and their case study featured on the book PM Next Generation, published by Wiley.

Informal discussion with Ambev representatives about the future of project management and their case study featured in the book PM Next Generation, published by Wiley.

In this week's episode, Ricardo addresses the Passion Economy. There is a "passion economy" when you make money doing something you enjoy. The biggest illustration of this notion is the digital influencer, who may share information, expertise, and insights about a topic they find fascinating and monetize the content through a YouTube or TikTok channel, for example. However, the process is not as simple as most people believe.

Every CEO or leader is accountable for overseeing strategy design and delivery in his or her organization. Leaders also recognize that strategy implementation excellence is central to the organization’s sustainable growth and prosperity. Yet most strategic initiatives fail because of flawed implementation, at great cost in time and resources.

In this episode, Ricardo tries to define what making progress really is. Many times even brilliant people get trapped thinking that movement = action = progress. Movement for the sake of proving you are doing something is pointless, consumes energy and resources and will not take you and your organization anywhere.

In this podcast, Ricardo talks about his visit to the world's largest ship, the Danish Triple-E, anchored in the Copenhagen harbour this month. The ship was manufactured in South Korea and had several technological solutions of a sustainable design. The "E" stands for "Economic of Scale", "Energy Efficiency" and "Environmental Performance". Learn more about the ship at www.worldslargestship.com

Ricardo takes a quick tour of some parts of the Maersk Triple-E: The Largest Ship to carry containers in the World (2013). The visit took place at the port of Copenhagen, Denmark. Triple E ships belong to a category of super ships for the transport of containers, with a capacity to transport more than 18,000 containers (18,000 TEU). The name "Triple E" is derived from the principles that guided its design:

In this first podcast of 2013, Ricardo comments, from the project management perspective, his surprising visit to the Harry Potter Studios in London. How a brilliant idea, through a outstanding execution, has become one of the most successful projects in the world. See the pictures: http://rvarg.as/harrypotter

In this podcast Ricardo talks directly from Albert Einstein Hospital, his first project management work in health care. He reflects the dimension that project management is taking place in non-typical areas for projects.

Directly from Paris, France, Ricardo talks in this podcast about the most important characteristics of project management for the development of luxury goods, where criteria like speed and cost reduction are revisited and re-contextualized to reach a market that is driven by other assumptions. He focus on the image construction and exclusivity as essential peculiarity of the functional scope (requirement) of this kind of product.

In this podcast, Ricardo presents the highlights of the conference realized last week in Amman, Jordan. The event discussed the association between leadership, governance, execution, and strategy. Ricardo led the discussions about execution and projects.

In this podcast Ricardo discusses the real role of the project manager as a decision maker. He afirms that the project manager doesn't have the function of only generate elegant reports and preparing meetings. His/her role goes above and beyond this. The PM role is to take the right decision to lead the project to success.

In this podcast, Ricardo presents the PMBOK Guide (c) 4th Edition process flow. In the flow, the 42 processes of PMBOK are organized based on the natural project flow and not by the knowledge area. The final artwork of the flow is available for free download at www.ricardo-vargas.com (download area).