Kari Silvennoinen on Project Management
I spent a week-end in the world´s most beautiful city. You name it: Rome. Rome is just a big breathtaking open-air museum, and an open-air fashion show too by the way.
Here on the picture, you see my friend Kari, from Helsinki, Finland. We were brunching at ´Gusto yesterday, a very trendy place not far from the Spanish Stepsides (the exact address is Piazza Augusto Imperatore 9). Kari provided me with very useful professional insights, and agreed for me to share it on this blog.
Kari is an IT Project Manager at a major Nordic energy company. His projects involve mobile messaging platform implementation and IT risk and governance issues, among others. He is accountable for the project´s budget, quality and is obviously expected to make it match deadlines.
More interesting is the fact that Kari usually doesn´t have dedicated resources: he needs to “borrow people” from different types of IT resources (IT dept., contractors, etc.), people who don´t necessarily have time (or willingness) to commit to another project, and boss. You can imagine how enhanced Kari´s diplomatic & negotiation skills must have resulted! The role of the project owner (the Project Manager´s supervisor, directly reporting to the CIO) is also key: the project owner (who has the hierarchical clout) and manager (who has the execution drive) really need to seduce “client departments” when explaining why this project fits the company culture, goals, but also why the end-customer will benefit from such a service.
No doubt Scandinavian technological leadership and culture of consensus & dialogue help a lot in this challenging environment.
Oh, by the way & before I finish, here is Kari´s daily reading roll:
- Daring Fireball (Apple news, Kari is Mac-addicted)
- Reddit (news)
- Slashdot.org (News for nerds)
- and the late Drunken Blog (about Apple)
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[...] Michel blew away my first week-end guess: the answer of today’s quizz was of course Steve Case, a co-founder and former CEO of America Online, later known as AOL. I was actually hoping to attract people and start a nice conversation, but I gave away too many information: Michel, a former marketing executive at PepsiCo, guessed thanks to the mention of the 1992 IPO, pioneering the Internet era. Kari would’ve found out thanks to the last sentence referring to the ethical blunder: a few weeks ago, AOL released the search histories of about 650,000 users – making privacy concerns hit the headlines and urging some of its top executives to leave the company. [...]
[...] And Apple, despite serious heating issues, is very attractive too. It’s been almost a decade I haven’t had a Mac, and fifteen years since I used a Mac laptop (a Powerbook 170 if my memory’s correct, I still have it somewhere). Not only do I miss it, I’m also getting influenced by many Mac-lovers around me (like Kari and Vincent). [...]