Ukrainian Churches in Winnipeg

So, this is my first post related to my personal life, not project management :)

As you know Ukrainian community in Manitoba is so huge that every Manitoba's resident knows at least 3-5 people with Ukrainian origins :). Approximately 150,000 Manitobans are Ukrainian or have Ukrainian parents or grandparents. 

As I also come from Ukraine I have decided to explore Ukrainian heritage here, in Manitoba. Just for fun and new experience. 

My first "project' is related to Ukrainian catholic and orthodox churches in Manitoba. 

The goal is to visit all churches, take photos and find out something interesting about the particular location or the community. As this is a start only I listed all churches I found in Google to plan our holiday trips.

Let me, please, introduce 18 Winnipeg Ukrainian Churches!

If you want to visit these masterpieces here is a map to drive

Saint Basil's Ukrainian Catholic

202 Harcourt St, Winnipeg, MB

Saint Basil's Ukrainian Catholic 

202 Harcourt St, Winnipeg, MB

Updating Professional Profile

During my 2-week Employment Workshop I've decided to update my Profile as a short introduction of my background and expertise following new gained knowledge. It took 2 hours to think over the proper statements and then revise them twice :)

So, here is my professional profile that I share to my potential employers:  

As a project manager I have a great experience in all phases of project life-circle in IT, Insurance/Reinsurance, Sales, Education, and NGO areas. My expertise includes projects elaboration from ideas to complete brand new products that are in market demand. This contains the initiation, planning, management of project documents (SOWs, Proposals, and Budgets etc.), modeling, prototyping, and presentations at all stakeholder levels.

Transferring projects to new managers: First things to be done early in the game

One old friend of mine asked me what should be done at first preparing a project for transfer to another project-manager. He was curious to get a check list to follow and to be assured that a new project manager would get all necessary information to refrain both high project quality and good team performance. 

Hence, I tried to pull my wits together and here I came up with a few steps I always follow picking up or handing over my projects. This to-do list is composed based on my experience only and should not be treated as a final say. Moreover, I would greatly appreciate any discussion on different cases that might be helpful for my future experience. 

Undoubtedly, the most important for a new project manager is to understand a business case and related domain of the project. In my humble opinion, an excellent project manager should be a subject matter expert as well. However, this is a rare and very specific case, so let's skip aspect in this review. But keep in mind - business case is 100% clear, a new project manager is aware what benefits come along with the product. 

Where my PM day goes

From time to time I try to track my productivity to get a clue what tasks my work time is spent on. Project Manager usually has a lot to do during the business day and sometimes analysis of the workload is good to avoid non-management activities. You know what I mean... Not to forget delegating tasks that are not inherent in PM's schedule like operational routine. 

I decided to do this after I caught myself updating some manual for a new version of some software instead of diving into a scope planning of the delayed but vital project. 

As my Company requires the employees to report their tasks daily in a special time-tracking system it was not a big deal to retrieve data and visualize my recent week in a pie chart. And here is what I got:

To have better understanding of my tasks I also use a free time-capture tool RescueTime that lets me keep track of the time I spend on various activities, so I can have an accurate idea of where my day goes :). 

Building The Team by Making Sushi Rolls

This post was inspired by my team lead's affection towards sushi rolls that has become a strong tradition for the part of our large team. We usually have a team-building session at our office kitchen every two months. I would say that was the place where I tried to make sushi roll by myself for the first time. 

Actually, sushi has become one of my favorite tool to develop my project teams. This allowed me - who was managing 3 different teams simultaneously at that time - to look at teams' players from a new perspective.

As I mentioned in my previous posts, my professional arenas before the IT-industry were insurance industry, sales and teaching activities in the university. All my previous team-building workshops contained some standard for Ukrainian market items: bowling, outings with a few team games. They were efficient enough increasing team's performance for some time, but it always was a big headache to get $400-500 from the top-management to organize that. No, they were not greedy for money, not a jot :). This is how the things always go in most Ukrainian companies whether they are in sales or in engineering industries. 

Processes Flowchart: Rita Mulcahy vs. PMI PMBOK 5. Project Initiating

Here is a short comparison of two popular charts of project management processes. One flowchart was taken from Rita Mulcahy - a recognized expert in PMP studies. The second comes from the latest PMI PMBOK 5th Edition. 

I know that "every man to his taste", but at the same time this comparison helped me to memorize all inputs, tools and techniques and output for each process. 

Many certified project managers confirm that memorizing and understandings of these charts are the keys to the successful PMP exam pass. At least 70% of all questions are within the processes flowchart. 

What Project Manger should know to accomplish projects