Introduction
The lessons learned from the Project Management Institute’s Certified Associate Project Manager certification course are a mouthful. Seriously. I’d like to slap the narrators with a wet fish for every word more than two syllables long. The PMI’s main talent is the ability to create sentences as long as a goose neck. Funny as it is, PMI gives valuable words for describing the weird happenings of project delivery. It was the term requirements that opened up my eyes to what’s going on with TDOT’s Project Delivery Network.
Now we all know requirements is a common word. It becomes quite the important piece of the project when the word is understood through PMI.
Requirement – a condition or capability that must be present in a product, service, or result to satisfy a business need. – PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge)
One of the first things I noticed as a young contributor in roadway projects was the utter lack of requirements presented at the beginning of them. Some stakeholder (another PMI term) would come up at phase in the middle of the project and say something needed to be included or some existing problem needed addressing. After they receded back to the wall and blended in to the wallpaper, I would always be left lamenting, “If I only had known that at the beginning!” It is this thing that the new TDOT project delivery is setting out to address. I am startled and excited.
