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The Future of Work is Human

Author : Ruzanna TARVERDYAN, PMP

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Achievement of Sustainable Development is the most urgent and imperative collective duty that all development stakeholders must work on! As stated in the report of the UN Secretary-General: A Life of Dignity for All, the world’s quest for dignity, peace, prosperity, justice, sustainability and an end to poverty has reached an unprecedented moment of urgency. Addressing it without compromising our shared prosperity and the right to development of future generations requires alteration of public sector governance and development of  monitoring and reporting framework for tracking implementation and follow-through on the agreed strategies and policies to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

Since first United Nations Conference on Environment and Development,  Rio conference in 1992, the international community has inspired to integrate the social, economic, and environmental dimensions within a single framework. Nonetheless, no country has yet succeeded. Prevailing governance systems tend to separate these pillars at policy, planning, and management levels. This disconnect has led to a widening of inequality, both at global and national levels, pervasive social tension, an alarming pace of climate change and environmental degradation.

There is a consensus that given the political complexity of reforms, sustained progress will require ownership and entail a strong focus on capacity-building in key public institutions. And, now how does this Quest for the new paradigm influence the Project Management Community?

I was born in Soviet Armenia, but graduated from the Yerevan State University already when my small country declared independence from former the Soviet Union. And it was precisely in 1992, when I was invited to manage the first Institution Building Project in Armenia, financed by the World Bank Loan. Before taking the directorship of the Aid Coordination Center I was further engaged in multiple, Rehabilitation, Structural Adjustment and Enterprise Development projects. My Government was committed to a detailed program of interventions, and accomplished most of the projects' objectives. The Bank responded with a relevant technical assistance to Armenia's needs and built management capacity, enabling key reforms, for the transition to a private sector based economy. 

The early 2000 were years of transformation of multilateral thinking towards more effective and efficient delivery on Human Development outcomes. Dedicated to promotion of social justice and passionate about the role of international development institutions, in 2001 I embarked on my international career and joint the International Labour Office as a young professional to become part of the decent work generation. It was with an immense pride, that already in Geneva, I received the news that Operations Evaluation Department Independent Evaluation Office(now Group) 2004 OED Good Practice Award went to the Armenia Rehabilitation Credit; and 2005 OED Good Practice Award for Best Country Program was granted to Armenia Country Team 1996-2002, I had the pleasure and the privilege to work with.

Since the inception of ILO's Decent Work Agenda in 1999, Decent work has become a universal objective and has been included in major human rights declarations, UN Resolutions and outcome documents from major conferences including Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the World Summit for Social Development (1995), World Summit Outcome Document (2005), the high level segment of ECOSOC (2006), the Second United Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (2008-2017), Conference on Sustainable Development (2011) and in the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2015).

There is a universal acceptance, that productive employment and decent work are key elements to achieving a fair globalization and poverty reduction. The Decent Work Agenda sums up the aspirations of people in their working lives and aims at simultaneous pursuit of four objectives: job creation, rights at work, social protection and social dialogue, with gender equality as a crosscutting objective. It encompasses productive employment opportunities, that delivers a fair income, ensure security in the workplace and provide social protection for families, it calls for working environment that guarantee better prospects for personal development and social integration, freedom for people to express their concerns, organize and participate in the decisions that affect their lives and equality of opportunity and treatment for all women and men.

The new 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by all UN Member States during the UN General Assembly in September 2015, among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, defined Goal 8: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.  Furthermore, key aspects of decent work- employment creation, social protection, rights at work, and social dialogue, are widely embedded in the targets of many of the other 16 goals of the UN’s new development vision.

During the 101st Session of the International Labour Conference, in 2012 the tripartite constitutes called for “Giving globalization a human face”. There is universal consensus, as supported by the empirical results, that the current model of globalization is evidently yielding uneven results for countries’ sustainable development. Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz gave a powerful speech in 2013, at the annual AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles concluded that not all nations succeed in reaping the fruits of international expansion, a cutting edge technology and making globalization serve their national interest- to create ”shared prosperity”— the only kind of prosperity that can truly be sustainable.

The Agenda 2030 explicitly calls for integration of multiple dimensions of sustainable development into a single framework and there is a wide consensus on a need of trans-disciplinary analysis embracing a complex system consisted of multiple dimensional phenomena such as globalization, poverty and other constituents of sustainable development.

As rightly submitted by the World Economic Forum, already, artificial intelligence is all around us, from self-driving cars and drones to virtual assistants and software that translate or invest has minimised human errors, eliminated low value-adding human work and accelerated the speed of work, while creating a superior employment experience for the broader workforce. Impressive progress has been made in AI in recent years, driven by exponential increases in computing power and by the availability of vast amounts of data, from software used to discover new drugs to algorithms used to predict our cultural interests.  

As Professor Klaus Schwab, the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum foresees it, as we are living through the Fourth Industrial Revolution, these new transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before: it may lead to human augmentation, as a result of  the inexorable integration of technology in our lives, some of our quintessential human capacities, such as compassion and cooperation could diminish, the revolutions occurring in biotechnology and AI, will compel us to redefine our moral and ethical boundaries.

In 2004 Finn Kydland during his Novel Lecture recalled the words of Robert Lucas, 1980 Nobel Laurate in Economics, who defined the functions of theoretical economics:

to provide fully articulated, artificial economic systems that can serve as laboratories in which policies that would be prohibitively expensive to experiment with in actual economies can be tested out at much lower cost…  Our task, as I see it…is to write a FORTRAN program that will accept specific economic policy rules as ‘input’ and will generate as ‘output’ statistics describing the operating characteristics of time series we care about, which are predicted to result from these policies.”  

Kidland suggested to place people in desired model environments and record how they behave under alternative policy rules and rightly stated that the required information on “individual responses could be documented relatively cheaply by means of… censuses, panels [and] other surveys…”

 

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, in his briefing to the Security Council on Global Governance Post-COVID-19, stated that the Covid-19 pandemic is one of the most dangerous challenges this world has faced in our lifetime. It is above all a human crisis with severe health and socio-economic consequences.

As stated by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, World Day of Social Justice 2014: “experience shows that economic growth, on its own, is not sufficient. We must do more to empower individuals through decent work, support people through social protection, and ensure the voices of the poor and marginalized are heard.

In 2002 another Nobel laureate Ronald Coase in “Why Economics Will Change” had criticized this failure to look at the system as the object of the study and highlighted objectively that it may well take quiet long time to do so:

„Now how does it look?  Well, that it’s complicated is not a question, nor that it could take a long time if we start, as I hope we will, to study this system. Studying it may take one hundred years. It may take two hundred years.  But anyway, we should start.“

The availability of statistical information has considerably improved during. The advent of information and communication technologies, along with the Fourth industrial revolution provides an unprecedented opportunity to strengthen data collection and statistical analysis. Enhanced data availability will create the information basis for development of global models, thus providing an analytical underpinning for global governance. The methodological advancement of statistical development and analysis, and most importantly the ”data revolution” called by the report of the UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel will create legal, political and methodological grounds for such a change.

There is an ongoing debate about the shift: from hands to heads to hearts and giving a human face to work! Faced with the immense challenges embodied by the SDGs and accentuated by COVID-19, as the world is embarking on the implementation of the Great Reset initiative, announced by the World Economic Forum, there is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis and to improve the state of the world. Within this context humanizing the work is becoming an imperative and not just an option!

PM Master Class April: Building your personal brand

Most companies and individuals underestimate the power of social media. Personal branding is a key potential driver for today’s success in business. Establishing your professional brand and competence has never been this important. Beyond this, value in today’s economy is mostly about human relationships. Social networks are a key source of relevant information to get to know your prospects, customers and partners. To connect and engage with them. It has never been this efficient and even easy as it is today. If you do it right.
Learn “why, what and how” in an intense virtual training over 2 Saturday mornings lead by a pioneer and expert in the field. Yes, it will profoundly change how you see and operate your presence and activities on social media. You will see the impact right away, once you apply the
learnings.

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The PM Master Class Team engaged the Digital and Social media pioneer German Ramirez as trainer and is offering you this online seminar for an attractive fee. Mark your calendar and sign up here: https://pmi-switzerland.ch/index.php/events/events-list/pm-master-class-building-your-personal-brand
 

Editorial PMI Switzerland Newsletter March 2021

 Author : Geetanjali Bhat, PMP

Dear members and newsletter subscribers!

Today, I see good sunshine and long bright evening outside my window giving all of us a ray of hope ahead. As we mark in 20th year of PMI Switzerland, “the new normal” with longer lockdown and stricter measures, we from PMI community are continuously learning, innovating new ideas and sharing with the world.

Last year, we all know how an exceptional year it had been starting with online events. This year we have planned for more exciting events with latest subject’s expertise going on, all over the world. Soft skills sessions like “How to present powerfully online” would be soon held this month.

And of course, the much-awaited 20th Anniversary event would be announced soon; I am sure there will be loads of fun and surprises to all of us in coming months. Stay Tuned!

I would like to thank PMI Switzerland community for creating innovative events and surprises that we continue to learn and aspire each of us in the community.

I wish every member of PMI community, healthy and safe days ahead. Let’s all think positive and keep learning and motivating each other in our PMI community.

Cheers!

Geetanjali Bhat, PMP

Introduction to the DA Mindset and the PMI DA Certificates

 Author: Nikola Goran Čutura, PMP

 Nikola Goran Cutura 100

After the initial Disciplined Agile event held virtually last June, that attracted more than 100 participants on-line, we are happy to continue with the series.

The next event will be the interactive workshop with Alvission, PMI training partner. This workshop will concentrate on real-world examples of DA and on possible certification paths. If you want more practical information oa DA practical usage and how you can benefit from being DA certified, this is the right opportunity!

Alvission will give a short introduction and then they will explain DA with a showcase and a practice example for an Agile Transformation with the DA Toolkit and how to choose your WoW, your Way of Working.

 

Participants will be able to ask questions and discuss with the DA experts. The four DA certificates offered by PMI are: DASM, DASSM, DAC and DAVSC.

During the workshop participants will learn what these abbreviations mean, understand the added value of the associated certificates and see the possibilities of becoming certified.

 

As a reminder, Disciplined Agile (DA) is a hybrid process toolkit that provides context-specific guidance for individuals and teams and is known as the world’s only comprehensive Agile Body of Knowledge.

Disciplined Agile is the business-leading process decision toolkit that links the collaboration of agile software development, DevOps, IT and business teams in your organization.

The Disciplined Agile (DA) Toolkit provides a simple guide to help organizations make context-sensitive choices about their Way of Working (WoW) to create a solid foundation for business agility.

 

The event is open to all interested parties and is free of charge so don’t hesitate to join and learn about new opportunities!

Looking forward to ZOOM-ing you on March 2nd at 18:30!

 

Disciplined Agile – Interactive Live Online Workshop

 

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Editorial PMI Switzerland Newsletter February 2021

Author: Daniel Rodellar, PMP

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Dear members and newsletter subscribers,

 

This edition of the newsletter is bringing you a combination of news about exciting future events and a glimpse of past events, so you can assess what has happened on our events' side. The teams are doing great efforts to bring you events that are interesting for the Project community that we are.

 

We would like to take this opportunity to thank our volunteers for their hard work to “keep the lights on”, and our sponsors for their support and engagement. These days many things keep changing constantly. Change is happening too frequently, and we do not have the time to cope with all of it. Rules and people change, behaviors change, and we need to adapt to keep on. Probably if we had a record of changes (like we do in projects) since 2020, we will have a long list and some changes on the previous ones will make it difficult to track.

 

On the newsletter side we also have changes, happening mostly on the backstage. New people are joining, some are leaving, and some change positions. Sometimes we can arrange transitions, and transfer knowledge and know-how, and sometimes it comes as a surprise with immediate effect, no time to transition. We need to navigate these waters and get in mind the vision of the bright days that we remember, to guide the boat to that destination.

 

On behalf of the newsletter team, I wish you all to be safe, in good health and to have the courage to navigate against all storms, using your project gears, tools, wisdom and knowledge to succeed. Use your expertise to maneuver your projects to destination.

And thank you, our reader, for the precious time you spend with us!

 

Daniel Rodellar, PMP

Publications Director