Preface
The album you are holding is the record of a very unique organization that celebrates its 10th Anniversary in September 2009. This is the story of a ten-year journey from a simple vision to the creation of PMI Taipei Taiwan Chapter (PMITW).
Our proud accomplishment led us to think that recounting the experiences of the past decade would serve not only as a major inspiration of how an organization is conceived and grown, but also as the motivation to successfully move this esteemed organization through its next decade.
This book is neither meant as self-aggrandizement nor propaganda. Rather we simply intend to faithfully tell the true story about what we have accomplished to fulfill the responsibilities as a professional not-for-profit organization (NPO) in promoting project management as well as the difficulties and challenges we encountered during our growth to become one member of a global family of known as the Project Management Institute (PMI).
In early 2009, this publishing project was launched and authorized by PMITW’s Board of Directors. Because of my personal belief in the original vision, coupled with a decade of service to the organization, I realized that it should be my responsibility to shepherd this project from its inception to its eventual and successful conclusion. This is my final mission as president of PMITW.
Our project team is composed of two staff persons that the Secretariat office has - Dr. Simon Fu, current secretary general and Miss Kay Tsao. The team is joined by another volunteer - Dr. Hsing-Tung Chou (HT) – who serves as the book’s reviewer. Despite the number of people directly involved in the project, there can be little doubt that it is truly the result of the collective innovations and synergy of wisdoms of all those involved in the chapter’s history – our Board of Directors, our professional staffs, and the hundreds of volunteers who have dedicated themselves to PMITW.
I am truly blessed to have been one of the original founders of the chapter and have been involved in almost all of the activities of the organization since its inception. This has given me a wonderful and unique perspective to view and review the total history of the chapter.
Fortunately my good memory supplemented by my self-required habit to write a “time-sheet” and “working dairy” for my daily tasks, has allowed me to be the locus of the chapter’s unique history. Additionally, I have always entreated my staffs to continuously write various press releases and annual reports – that have helped me recount all the details of what was happening, who was involved, which organizations collaborated with us, the problems we encountered, and what our outcomes were.
These precious assets made my ambition of writing the story of PMITW to be fulfilled. The original plan was only to write the story in approximately 5,000 to 8,000 words in the first chapter as a general introduction. However, after the start of my work, I was becoming significantly aware that I shouldn’t be limited by these numbers primarily because there are so many things, events, and people that must be included in this truly inspiring story. I especially believed it would be a dereliction of my duty if I just simply described people and events as a quick blip on the screen of the decade-long history of our organization.
One of the significant problems I found was I could not tell the story of PMITW without mentioning her twin sister, the National Project Management Association (NPMA). I wore two hats as the president for each of these two NPOs from 2000 to 2006. Before 2003, they were just a “one-body” and were officially separated in 2003, but not totally divided until August 2006 - the day I left NPMA. The long story behind them must be disclosed. In fact, if there were no dream of “bringing PMI to Taiwan,” there would be no NPMA. Conversely, without NPMA, there would be no PMITW. Actually, NPMA was leading the development and promotion of project management in Taiwan as well as in Greater China from 2000 to 2005.
Despite the changes of the positions, roles, and status of these two NPOs, their successors should always know what their predecessors have contributed to build the solid foundation that they inherit. This is the strongest of all motivations for me to fulfill my obligation!
This book was not written at my desk in my single office, but rather came to life as I traveled over two very busy months. I dedicated time to this work using periods in my active life, including every nights, weekends, time during my travels, at my home in Taipei, at a beach resort, at my son’s Virginia home, at my brother’s house in Bay Area of California (looking after my 84 old mother while writing), hotels in Atlantic City, and finally in New York City during my family vacation!
I was deeply attracted by the scenarios I was trying to recall, and contacted the many people who had witnessed the details who served to check my memory with their reliable information. In mid-August, when I was in Washington DC visiting my old friends, the story was finally completed at the night of August 17th in 60,000 words (in Chinese) - six multiples of what it was originally intended to be!
To accommodate all the additional content, my team decided to restructure this album by differentiating our story into four parts, each with several chapters, for a total 20 chapters.
As a consequence I wrote the portion of the book entitled “PMI-Taiwan’s Growth- A Journey to Excellence” which is divided into seven chapters. They include:
• Dream and Reality that describes how the founders made their dream of “bringing PMI to Taiwan” come true despite facing a severe lack of resources and funding;
• Goal and Actions that depicts how the volunteer team set up a strategic goal to promote and market PMI, as well as PMP;
• Advocacy and Cultivation that emphasizes how important it has been to advocate project management in public, and what and how PMITW has spoken to the enterprises and government agencies for developing its reputation and value of PMITW;
• Crisis and Opportunity that describes the success of the first project management (PMP/CPMP) training programs in Taiwan (which, in turn, led to many copied trainings that followed as well as some serious infringements to the copyrights of Traditional Chinese translated in the PMBOK Guide). It also mentions the severe challenges that both PMITW and NPMA faced and what problems were solved;
• Events, Media, and Campus which records what events PMITW/NPMA have held, and who were the well-known speakers and long term supporters from all over the world. It also depicts how PMITW/NPMA cooperated with those media that helped to promote PMP and cultivate its respective public. It especially reports how the PMITW promoted the CAPM certificate in campus as a model in the world;
• Globalization and Localization lists how PMITW actively participated in PMI’s Leadership Institute Meetings and Global Congress in North America, Asia Pacific, and Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA) as well as attending research conferences, and volunteer programs to faithfully accomplish our obligation as a faithful member the PMI global society. It also depicts how PMITW/NPMA cooperated with the PMI-Hong Kong Chapter, and Beijing Tsinghua University to develop an exchange platform for advancing project management in the Greater China region. Finally, it also tells the long eight-year journey of how PMITW requested PMI-GOC to provide Traditional Chinese language aid for the PMP/CAPM exam;
• Lessons Learned and Value Recreation reflects the facts and observations of the reasons that damaged and depreciated the value of the PMP certificate, and submits recommendations and advice how to protect the PMP and recreate its value. The chapter concludes with the lessons that I have learned from my 10 - plus years’ experiences as a volunteer working for PMI. I regret that I can only provide the English summaries to the non-Chinese reader for each of those chapters due to the limitations of the words of this book.
Part II named "Advocacy and Certification Promotions" is divided into 6 Chapters. This part summarizes more than 20 reports with photos of the events, e.g., (such as our Annual Plenary Conferences, monthly lectures, seminars, workshops, forums, field trips that were held around the island for serving our members and non-members) while always advocating project management. Also included are reports of special events, such as “PMP Benchmarking Enterprises Award (PBEA)” for promoting the value of PMP and the good practices and applications of project management in organization. In addition, we report on the road shows for promoting CAPM as well as the feedback we received in. Our volunteer program led to hundreds of volunteer joined us for contributing their times, passions, and experiences to us are also addressed.
We give a special thank-you to the members of those staffs who have worked for our Secretariat office during the past ten years, including Ivy Liu, Queena Chiu, Queenie Lu, Simon Fu (since six reports were written by Simon in recent years, Dr. David Hillson praised Simon by telling him, “You are getting world famous.”), and Kay Tsao. Their reports demonstrate how outstanding and active we have been and still are. Most importantly, more than 10 of their reports were published in the important publication of PMI Global called “PMI-Today” - a monthly newsletter for over 300,000 PMI’s members throughout the world. These published reports have made PMITW one of the most popular components in PMI global community due to its high exposure.
Although this portion is completely written in Chinese without translation, we don’t have any problem letting our English reader understand most of the contents that we describe, since they are collected and combined with Chinese reports in PMI Today. We show our grateful appreciation to those 24 foreign friends who have been invited and delivered their outstanding speeches, seminars, and/or workshops to our members, and as such, this Part II especially collects their photos along with the dates that they were performed in Taiwan. In addition, the ways and means that our distinguished volunteer program within PMITW has developed is also described.
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