The company I’m working for is built upon a rigid hierarchical structure of functional departments where even low budget initiatives must acquire several rows of signatures filled in before going anywhere, including the Chairman’s one.

Just to give an idea of what this means, all decisions involving more than US$ 40,000 (forty thousand dollars) in financial resources must also pass through the company’s council for evaluation, validation and approval.

Within a company of that size things scale very quickly, so reaching the 40K limit is quite easy and the bureaucracy of going through the council’s approval can be a real pain in the neck for kicking off any project.

Project Management concepts are also something new in the company’s environment. Actually, before the arrival of the new IT manager (a.k.a. my boss) the company had no formal Project Management at all being applied anywhere.

But it turns out that the boss was just finishing an MBA course with emphasis on Project Management, and he was very excited to start using some techniques to keep track of the company’s IT department endeavors.

He often came to my desk bringing examples and templates of documents: terms of this, terms of that, and some funny charts with plenty of boxes on them describing project’s tasks.

I started to follow those models for all documentation I was producing, and he was quite satisfied with the results, but despite of the fact that those things were starting to make a lot of sense to me, I felt that I was juggling with something bigger than one could realize at first glance.

So, I decided to get deep into that matter by joining a ten saturday course (40 hours) where I’ve had the chance to learn the fundamentals of Project Management, its areas of knowledge, its processes, hard skills, soft skills, and all things I think you already know (or at least, has had an overview) since you are interested in reading my words.

I won’t lie to you. When playing the tech part of the play I used to be very skeptical about the benefits of Project Management processes and documentation. To me, it was just a bunch of paperwork. But when I started to study it, when I started to understand it... well, things changed (big time).

Now I’m working hard to push Project Management concepts forward in the company’s environment. I’ve applied it, and I’ve seen, in practical terms, the benefits of the practices, and that’s why I’m sitting here, writing about it in first place :o)