On Monday 28 October  2015, the new Project Excellence Baseline (PEB) was introduced at the World Congress of the International Project Management Association (IPMA) in Panama. Please ready my blog about this World Leading Project Management Congress here.

As a consequence, all international assessors and jury members had to go through an intensive three days training.

I fully support that IPMA acknowledges the importance of all assessors having to execute this intensive training to make sure that the assessments are executed at the highest possible level. Understanding the model and alignment between the assessors is key to executing high quality assessments.

Between Friday the 22nd and Sunday the 24th of January I joined the first training in the Netherlands. I was together with 28 other international assessors and jury members from 12 countries around the world, like Brazil, Malaysia, UK, Germany, Poland, Italy etc.

The training was given by some of the co-founders of the new model: Grzegorz Szałajko, Michael Boxheimer and Pau Lian Staal.

After an individual introduction, a high level picture of the new PEB was explained by Grzegorz, including appealing and self-explainable marketing materials. In the afternoon we started exploring the model with the help of an existing case study. The set-up of the training is mainly focused on working in small groups in order to work closely together on multiple assignments. It’s good that they gave a work lecture and not a one directional communication training with just a lot of slides; active participation enabled us to learn all the ins and outs of the model. The results of the groups had to be presented and a lively open discussion with the entire group took place.

I was happy to notice that the assessors had a wealth of knowledge in Project Management. What was even better to see, was that our profession was discussed from different perspectives as the assessors had different backgrounds, like university, consultancy, project management and, like me, actively working in global project and program management.

In the following days we gradually explored and learned all details of the model via live cases and in-depth assignments. The interactions were sometimes intense. We were all eager to know the details. Along this process, we trained our interview skills and we had several feedback sessions. We were not only trained on the model, but we also discussed the code of conduct in detail. We all embraced this important document.

At the end of the three days we had to take an exam to prove that each of us individually had a good knowledge in regards to the new model.

I’d like to thank Grzegorz, Lian Pau and Michael as knowledgeable trainers and I look forward to be part of another interesting international assessment team to make an assessment somewhere on the planet. Please see here the schedule for the other Project Excellence trainings.

You can find some pictures below. They give good insight in the team atmosphere and our activities!