Grateful and Resolute

I recently returned from a 10 day trip to the east coast, visiting clients and attending PMI's annual Volunteer Strategy and Planning meeting in Philadelphia. In addition to accomplishing vast amounts of work given the availability of a longer day without interruption due to travel and time zone, the trip afforded me some personal reflection time to set personal expectations for the new year.

Of course, I am, as always, grateful for family, friends, good health, and professional colleagues on multiple continents. Probing deeper, however, brought forward the following additional things I am and continue to be grateful for:

- The visitors to this blog. In the last year, an increased number stopped to read at least the most recently posted article and some probed into past articles.
- The experience and learning afforded by volunteerism with PMI. I constantly find new learnings to apply in other areas of my life, including my professional work and this blog. This includes access to the many online courses offered by Harvard Business School.
- The impact I believe my day-to-day work has on education. Improving the education afforded to all students, regardless of age, should be a priority for America and I am able to help introduce improvements, even if only a few teachers and students at a time. This includes continuing to introduce the basics of project management to an industry which has been a late adopter.
- The opportunity to provide high quality education and training to aspiring project managers through an online offering of my Controlling Project Costs and Risks course at UCSD Extension. I no longer have the time to spend in the classroom, but continue to grow my network of students of project management. 2009 will mark the eighth year of this course, which has undergone several major transformations and improvements.
- Susan Peterson, who has graciously allowed me to re-publish her past articles on this blog.
- Fadi El-Eter at PM Hut who re-publishes Susan's and my articles on his site. Fadi is committed to making PM Hut one of the number one resources for project managers.

After reflecting on this abundance of opportunity, I made several resolutions for the new year to which I will be held accountable:

- After putting together my tax information, I found that 85% of my revenue of my online class was donated to support education, including the PMI Education Foundation and medical research and education at UC San Diego and the University of Hawaii. I will commit to 85% again this year, without limitation. Every student signing up for Controlling Project Costs and Risks will both get a superior project management education as well as contribute to continuing education and research.
- I will extend the online version of Controlling Project Costs and Risks to include a new resource on project management budgeting. While not all project managers are responsible for budgets (and often don't even know what the budget is), this seems like an important skill in a challenging economy.
- I will promote the concepts of RACI, SMART Goals, and Six Hats Thinking at every opportunity. These very fundamental concepts are useful in moving projects forward. This means they will be integrated into the online class as well.
- For the coming year, the articles of this blog will move more toward advanced project management and PMOs, while continuing to provide challenging questions for aspiring CAPMs and PMPs to consider.
- I will continue to dedicate time to PMI volunteer activities, both as a member of the Governance Committee and as a resource to the new Component Mentor for Region 7.

As always, if you have any thoughts you would like to share, please leave a comment on this post or drop me an email at sdcapmp@aol.com. Thanks for reading and Happy New Year!