A colleague of mine, who is certified PMP and managing many of our SharePoint projects, asked me recently if there is some kind of SharePoint training available which is more focused on how a SharePoint project can be managed successfully.
As far as I know there isn’t.
But actually I believe that it could hit quite some demand.
I have done many different types of SharePoint projects: intranets, extranets, external webs, huge, small, cloud etc.
In my experience you often have project managers who might have never done a SharePoint project and don’t know about the pitfalls of customizing such product to the customers likings.
As a result, things like planning the right steps in the right project stages, involving the right stakeholders, planning change management early enough, dealing with the infrastructure guys the right way 😉 etc. end up in the same problems again and again. False expectations of the client, too optimistic estimates because no one thought about testing, delays because the infrastructure was ordered to late…
A PM oriented SharePoint training could help us all to run the projects smoother 🙂
And a certificate on top of it could give the PMs some kind of quality stamp to have at least some knowledge about how to run a SharePoint project…
What do you think?
I think the certificate is not really neccesary, but I know that PMs would also like to have something in ther CV, which shows that they have been educated in running SP projects. The current exams and business user trainings don’t fit here.
@Vlad: I think there is a difference in the project management level compared to other projects. At least to ordinary software development projects. With SharePoint you build on an existing product. It involves quite a big deal of infrastructure, change mgmt, release mgmt, education etc.
I am not talking about small 2month customizations. I am thinking more about bigger projects which run a year or even sevaral years. Which might include SP release updates in between, integration of LOB systems etc.
But on the other hand, there might not be many ppl who are actually doing these kind of projects and don’t have the experience already…
