PMD Pro: a great investment
“We were introduced to the PMD Pro process in April 2013 after attending a capacity building workshop with InsideNGO in New York,” says Adriana Garcia-DeVun, Americas Director of Programs. “We felt that this approach fulfilled a need in our program work and decided to ensure that all managers responsible for projects and finance would be trained and certified in PMD Pro 1 by the end of the year.”
Adriana and her team started working with LINGOs later that year, initially devising a training program for 30 staff, and then extending this to others in the USA, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil and Argentina. Heifer’s project managers responded well, and found that the training materials and models could be easily adapted to their program work.
“We have all felt that this has been a great investment of resources, from a human, financial and time perspective,” continues Adriana. “We shared our learning with Heifer HQ, and translated materials to make them accessible to staff in Asia and Africa. We are now at a point at which PMD Pro methodology has been approved at Board level as our organization’s project management approach.”
“Many of our program teams started to use the processes and tools immediately after taking PMD Pro 1 certification and we are already seeing results,” she says. “Before we started using PMD Pro we had problems aligning budgets with implementation. We also lacked the clarity of roles and responsibilities that we now have as a result of using RACI methodology (a matrix that determines who is responsible, accountable, consulted and informed during project delivery).”
At a LINGOs facilitated workshop to design a major project in southern Haiti, Edwin Rocha, Regional Director for South America and the Caribbean, identified two tools as being critical to future success: “We easily identified the staff skills that we will need using the RACI Matrix, and used the Risk Management Matrix to understand where we need to take care during implementation.” Similarly, Victor Garcia, Director of Heifer’s National Office in Mexico endorsed the PMD Pro approach: “We used many of the tools when designing and planning a new program in Chiapas. This worked well and we now have clear management and an improved level of project detail.”
“The most significant, and visible difference is PMD Pro’s project cycle is now being used by all staff, and we all now use the same language when discussing projects,” says Adriana. “We have set a stronger base for our work, with all new projects being set up properly,” she says. “We find that we now have the space to look at wider issues, at project growth or future initiatives, without compromising the logical delivery of the project.”
— Adriana Garcia-DeVun
Americas Director of Programs, Heifer International