In addition to being a dedicated and passionate project manager I am also a dedicated and passionate musician. I can play a range of instruments moderately well but the instrument of choice is the last seven years has been the only recognised American musical instrument - the mighty banjo. With the banjo hanging like a pendulum from my shoulder I have been lucky enough to play in a band that has released five CDs, a live DVD and visited the USA on two on three occasions.

In the same way that project management practitioners can be described as beginner, intermediate or advanced, organizations can also be described as having low, medium, or high levels of project management. These levels of project management reflect the level of organizational project management maturity (OPMM). 

With so many projects to choose from, how do you select the right ones? It may sound obvious, but choosing the right projects will increase the likelihood of project success. In fact, the more time you spend choosing the right project and setting a project up for success at the very beginning the greater the likelihood of success at completion. Fundamental to this is the ability to apply some practically perfect filters to your project selection process to ensure the good ones get through and the bad ones are rejected.

There are a lot of people out there who claim to be project managers. Some of them have business cards that they can produce to prove they are a project manager. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t - but how do you know? The profession of project management is relatively young and by there are no countries yet which recognize it and protect it with legislation as a full profession, and as such there are a lot of ad-hoc project managers out there. So,  let’s start by defining exactly what a project manager is.

Have you ever been in a scenario like this? A project manager tells you that the project is halfway through, but has only spent 30% of the budget and therefore everything is going well. What's missing from the statement is, of course, the amount of work that you expected to do at this point in the project. The project would definitely be going well if you are halfway through it, had spent 30% of the budget, and achieved 60% of the work. However, it would not be so well if you had only achieved 20% of the work you expected to achieve by now.

There are many reasons that may drive you to want to improve as a project manager. You may be looking for that next promotion or more complex project assignments, or perhaps it is to ensure greater client satisfaction, or to increase the chances of project success. Maybe it’s for your own increased job satisfaction or simply a desire for personal growth.