PMI has a list of blogs they fell are important enough to mention in the current issue of PM Network. You'll need a membership to see the article - which I find ironic compared to other professional societies. Oh well. No need to list the sites, they're already done by Josh at PM Student.
I subscribe to all of these through Google Reader. It's an interesting list and reveals something about PMI. I'll assume they're listed alphabetically.
- Agile Blog is Rally Developments commercial portal
- The Critical Path is Derek Huether with 106 subscribers. Derek keeps track of PMP statistics.
- Drunken PM (This one was new to me) is a mirror on GanttHead (a commercial site selling producst around it's PM blogging). Software development focused with some good stuff around agile. 218 subscribers
- EarthPM which is about Green PM. We live in Boulder Colorado, which outside of Eugene, Corvallis, and Portland Oregon is probably the greenest place in the US. But at the same time we are a center for space and defense and the former DOE nuke weapons plant. Green PM "may" be the next big thing, we'll see. 34 subscribers.
- Elizabeth Harrin's A Girl's Guide to Project Management. Product and IT focused.
- Josh's pmStudent. 6290 subscribers.
- The Tao of Project Management. Which seems to be about "easy project management," and meditation stuff around managing projects. 204 subscribers.
- Voices of Project Management, which is the PMI outlet of PM.
What's interesting here - from the PoV of PMI- is these Project Management Blogs are mostly focused on managing software projects. And even more interesting about managing the softer side of software projects, training new project managers, or marketing products or services.
If this is the direction of the "official leader" in the project management community, then it doesn't bide well for those projects or the general project manager community itself.
On the other side the College of Performance Management and the College of Scheduling, have now moved to Virtual Communities (I voted against this) and now have more visibility. These two "colleges" (and they are the only two) are practicum organizations, with hands on as well as principles (Earned Value and heavy construction).
So Here's the Point (Finally)
Most of these identified sites are about software development PM'ing, except one which is a product site (Rally). That's not the issue. None of the sites seem to actually speak about "managing projects." Instead they speak - and this is important as well - about the personnel management side of project management. Projects are delivered with people, but "where's the beef?"
Where's the measures of physical percent complete, management of risk, cost analysis, techncial performance measures, programmatic architectures in various technical and business domains, subcontractor management, Management Reserve assessment. Where are the stated needs in terms of Capabilities mapped to requirements, then to the Integrated Master Schedule traceable to those requirements. Then of course to the Work Packages and Planning Packages that deliver those requirements. Stuff like that.
It seems those topics are not that interesting to the community of project managers subscribing to the suggested sites listed in PM Network. Not Good, since at the end of the day, the customer could probably care less about the self actualisation of the project members and simply wants the thing they paid for to work on or close to the planned finish date and on or close to the planned cost. Oh yea, did I say it again - have it work pretty much as they said when they started the project.
OK Everybody Back to Work
But before you do that and you're going to focus on the programmatic management aspects of projects, take a look here:
- Musings on Project Management - John Goodpasture speaks to the mechanics of managing projects.
- Kailash Await - speaks to the whole PM paradigm, both people and programmatic aspects.
- Pat Richard - is a "hard nosed" PM and shares his experiences. The notion of being "hard nosed" needs to come back into the conversation about the activities of project management.
- Pat Weaver - provide guidance on both people and processes for a broad variety of project domains.
- Dr. Mike Clayton - provides academically sound and practically applied advice on the people side of PM.
