Summary: The Footprints – My Decade Testimonies
Many people in the world do not know what they should do in their lives, let alone doing something truly meaningful. In early 1999, I was fortunate enough to have met two young men who dreamed of bringing PMI to Taiwan. It was that dream that ultimately changed my life! For the past ten years their courage and conviction drove me to assist them in their quest, and I am so pleased to see where we are now – a decade later. It has been a journey of love and faith, driven by the desire to advocate Project Management in Taiwan.
Chapter One- Dream and Reality
In May 1994, I returned to my alma mater - the George Washington University (GWU) to study my Ph.D. Since my degree was sponsored by a governmental scholarship, I had to reluctantly leave a billion dollar acquisition program of which I was in charge. I say reluctantly because at that time I loved my professional acquisition and project management career much more than pursuing additional academic degrees. Nonetheless, I returned to GWU.
My first class at GWU was called “Project/Program Management” taught by Professor William Wells. I truly enjoyed learning from his wisdom that combined his academic background with “real world” practical experiences. As the course moved along, I shared some of my own personal and commercial experiences. As a result, we established closer professor-student relationship for three reasons: (1) he accepted my request to be my minor program advisor for my Doctoral research; (2) he introduced me to join the Project Management Institute (PMI) and its DC chapter; and (3) he encouraged me to take Project Management Professional (PMP) exam (at the time Professor Wells was editor-in-Chief of PMI’s “Project Management Journal”). During this time I also attended a lecture of Professor Davidson Frame, who was the director of the Project Management Program at GWU’s business school (as well director of certification of PMI). Both Professor Wells and Professor Frame were instrumental in introducing me to the world of project management, and I believe my motive to advocate project management in Taiwan was as a direct result of meeting these two wise gentlemen.
I returned to Taiwan in May 1998 after I received my Ph.D., and my PMP designation. Shortly thereafter I was appointed as a director and founder of two institutes in the National Defense Management College (NDMC), National Defense University. At around the same time (in the summer of 1998), another student of Professor Wells, Mr. Richard Wu, (who, unfortunately I never met at GWU), and his friend, Mr. Wen-Cheng (Roy) Lin, both less than 30 years old, visited PMI headquarter, took the initiative to apply for a PMI Chapter in Taiwan. A short while later they received a positive response to set up the chapter. In early 1999, they were introduced to me by another GWU alumnus; we all met in my office for the first time to move this work forward.
Our first actions were to form a development team (that included some of my colleagues of NDMC, e.g., Benny Cheng) and started to establish the organization. Before I met Richard and Roy, they had already persuaded Mr. Robert Lo, a resident of the Bay area of California, (he was original owner of the right of establishing the Taiwan Chapter) to transfer his right to establish the Taiwan Chapter. Thanks to Mr. Lo’s early development work as a potential chapter, Richard and Roy continued to form an official Chapter. In October 1999, PMI-Taipei Taiwan Chapter was officially chartered, following Richard and Roy efforts to recruit 30 official members – the minimum required to start the chapter.
Things then became very difficult. First there were some PMI bureaucratic obligations that restricted the membership development and its registration (has to be from PMI’s channel) and, perhaps even more significantly, most people in Taiwan had neither heard about PMI, nor the PMP designation. Therefore, our team decided to strategically establish another local non-profit organization (NPO) that was much easier for the development of membership as well as the promotion of project management. Then the work was focused on how to merge the two organizations into one. As a consequence, in July 2000, almost a year later, “National Project Management Association (NPMA)” was formed and registered in Ministry of Interior of ROC government as the first nationwide professional project management NPO. Since then, the names of NPMA and PMITW were combined and oftentimes became interchangeable. I also found myself wearing two hats as the president of both organizations, as were most of the members of Board of Directors (BoD) of the NPMA.
After our first stage of development, we faced yet another considerable challenge larger than what we had experienced earlier; namely, financing the organization into a healthy and economic institution. Because most of our founders and early members were government employees, we lacked the necessary funding to allow PMITW/NPMA to survive. My friends advised me that no NPO could be established and operated without significant sponsorships and strong financial support.
Although I was busy working for the NDMC as my daily responsibility, I dedicated myself to making PMI a viable enterprise by using almost all of my non-office hours and weekends to the development and growth of PMITW/NPMA. Needless to say, this was a significant personal burden to be away from my family, but their support sustained me as I was working on a goal and a vision far bigger than myself.
I used my office as the NPO’s office, and asked my secretary to provide some administrative assistance. And all team members and new volunteers paid for their own coffee and food while we met at Starbucks or McDonalds. Even when we held a Board of Directors meeting, all attendees needed to pay NT 250 to cover each one’s lunch/dinner box plus the rental of the conference room!
I finally realized that we were all so naïve to run an association in such a manner. As the leader of PMITW/NPMA, I knew I had to do something that I had never done before in my entire life. I wrote a “Requested Donation Letter” and sent it to everyone I knew including my friends, colleagues, and contacts at some well-known enterprises. I also asked the Board members to help out as well with their personal donations. Less that two months later, we received nearly NT 125,000 (USD$4,000) as the initial development funding of the organization. This was a major milestone for us, and just the start of something wonderful!
Chapter Two - Goal and Actions
We relied on creative ways and means to begin our PMI initiative. Although our initial fund-raising effort raised enough early funding to print some materials for marketing and promotion, we still did not have enough working capital to maintain our basic operations. We tried to convince our business contacts who already had office space in convenient business areas to see if we could share an office by setting up a dedicated phone line and using their address as a basic point of contact. Despite our efforts, we could not secure adequate space.
Then Fortune smiled on us. Roy persuaded his parents to invest about one million NT dollars (USD$32,000) into his small business consulting company, WANTS, and he immediately rented an office that could accommodate his 4 employees with additional space to grow. This additional space was ample enough to share with PMITW/NPMA. In the spring of 2001, Roy’s company helped to operate PMITW/NPMA by receiving a percentage of the association’s incomes.
I signed an agreement with Roy that allowed us to finally have our own “home base” of operations. Thanks to such a good framework of cooperation, our development team could work, discuss, and meet at WANTS after our office time and during the weekend in a co-located environment that allowed us to develop a very practical development strategy, as well as a solid marketing plan. We were off and running!
From the very start of our development, I made the translation of “A Guide to Project Management Body of Knowledge, PMBOK Guide (1996 edition)” from English to Chinese my major personal priority. This was a significant undertaking that was started by Richard and his GWU classmate Chia-Huei who completed the work in late 1999, authorized by PMI. However, it eventually took me more than eight months to complete the editing and translation given the difficulties of translating highly technical and abstract terminology into the appropriate Chinese language.
I knew I could not proof read what had already been translated (especially the glossary) by myself. Therefore I spent hundred hours in discussions with several professors and experts from local industries to learn the more commonly used Taiwanese terms. This, combined with what I had already learned from my previous commercial and academic experiences, made the editing go well. The result of all this effort was the first-ever Chinese-translated PMBOK Guide in the world completed in August 2001. It was the also the first PMBOK in the world created especially for the Traditional Chinese reader.
Unfortunately, during this time, Roy’s business did not fare well. His business capital became deleted, and he eventually closed his WANTS office. As a result we became homeless again! Despite this situation, we relied on a new website we had just created, and, as well, our team worked diligently to develop our first virtual training program. Additionally, our collaboration with a local newspaper helped us to recruit new members and students and this made us believe that we could eventually get through this very tough time.
When we developed the first 106 hours Project Management training program in late 2001 (created for the major purpose of promoting PMP certification), we faced more problems still (many people had never heard of the PMP). Also, the computer-based test centers in Taiwan did not provide the PMP exam. Finally, the English language barrier of the majority people in Taiwan for the PMP test caused a major problem for its local promotion.
After considering these roadblocks, the Board of Directors of NPMA decided to develop a local certification, called “CPMP” in order to first resolve the test and language problems, and then later to emphasize this program (with the certification) was followed by PMI’s professional systems guidelines, but was conveniently tailored to the local system. It was our belief the a person who passed the CPMP with sufficient project management knowledge learned in Chinese language environment could later be encouraged to further take the English PMP exam with confidence.
In January 2002, the first CPMP program was successfully launched with 135 students. This significant interest in our program led to a nice infusion of capital to support our financial health. To supplement our work on the Chinese PMBOK Guide, I invited 4 other instructors to work with me to develop additional materials that not only focused on the knowledge areas addressed in the guide, but also on the case studies, the software tools application, and the practice of the “Project Management Plan.”
At the same time, NPMA established a “Virtual Institute of Project Management” and I invited Dr. Gee San, a well-know scholar and former dean of the College of Management, National Central University, to be the “Dean” of this institute. He participated in every opening and closing ceremony. In fact he personally awarded the individual students their certificates and provided special recognition to those students who were never absent from class as well as to the team that developed outstanding project management plan during the class. I personally taught five of our twelve courses, and was also instrumental in finding professional instructors of the other seven courses who would meet our strict performance requirements as evaluated by students and a standards committee chaired by Dr. San.
In addition to developing new training materials as well as the management of instructors and administration of the class, another challenging task was to develop the CPMP certification system. I invited Dr. Mag Hsu, a professor of Information Technology of NDMC, to join our team as the director of NPMA’s certification. Not only did she take this volunteer position quite seriously, but she also became especially responsible for designing the entire certification system that consisted of three major parts as follows:
• The first component is a “question random selection subsystem,” that was designed to select the questions by different categories, differentiated into “ 12 knowledge areas” (with an accompanying four levels of difficulty).
• The second component was the most costly and complicated one, which was the computer-based online exam system, similar to any word-class level computer test system (e.g., for the rest of PMP, TOEFL, etc.) but with less powerful functions. Mag and her team spent six months to develop those two components as an entire automatic test machine.
• The third one was the “question pool” itself, developed by all of our instructors and myself with over 1,500 questions which took about six months to complete.
When the estimated price of this entire development was calculated to be over a million NT dollars (a cost too high to be absorbed by NPMA), I made one of the toughest decisions in my life. I paid 700,000 NT (USD 23,000) for the computer test system out of my own pocket as my personal investment. These funds came from own personal pension, without considering the risk. The computer test system was launched in December 2002 which was a significant upgrade from the original test that originally required the CPMP exam to be done by paper using pencils, with all the examinees taking their test together in a large room!
Since my investment in the technology, examinees now take the exam by computer based in NPMA’s test center. This great milestone for CPMP then attracted more and more people to join our program. As a consequence, we rolled out more and more PMPs and CPMPs than ever before! The success of the CPMP made PMITW/NPMA come alive and become financially sustainable given the popularity of the newly computerized systems as well as word of mouth. A wonderful unintended consequence was that WANTS was also rescued and reorganized by new investors. I firmly believed that it was our moral obligation to pay back Roy for his sacrifices and losses which we were now able to do.
In February 2002, both PMITW/NPMA and WANTS moved to a nice office in a good commercial location, and we finally became stronger and more stable after our monumental two-year struggle for survival. Our journey was on track for success
Chapter Three- Advocacy and Cultivations
It seems that when many organizations begin their journey, the voyage starts as a very slow and time-consuming process. But as we have learned during these past ten years, a wonderful factor for ultimate success is the energy and enthusiasm of the leader and the team that makes the effort so worthwhile. Such was the case during the early stages of our own growth.
We knew how important it would be for us to be the primary advocate for project management in Taiwan as well as the region at large. To do so, we would have to spread the merits of project management in a multitude of ways – providing lectures, running conferences, and delivering seminars. One initial strategy was to provide lectures to the public community at no cost in hopes that information and interest would eventually spread by word of mouth.
Our first attempt to do this involved the entire team. Everyone looked at her/his own personal and professional networks and we created a formidable list from which we estimated about 35 – 40 professionals would attend our first lecture. Roy, Benny, Richard, and I donated funds from our own pockets to buy various snacks and drinks for our potential audience.
However, when our first lecture was delivered, all but five persons excluded our volunteers – each of whom was already sold on the notion of project management! Nonetheless I gave the lecture and was extremely pleased to do so despite the low attendance of newcomers. The feedback was very positive and this was very encouraging and provided us with our motivation to move forward. This early attempt to spread the word about the positive benefits of project management gave us hope that there was a far wider audience willing to listen to us in the future! (I might add here that the refreshments that went uneaten still went to good use – they were the basis of our meals for the next couple days!) And I remembered how sore it was that I felt for every bite that ate those foods. I told my team members “It will be a long way for us to go,” and they agreed. But the vision was clear, and we knew that it wasn’t necessarily what the vision was, but rather what the vision could do. And we knew that our vision would eventually have a number of technical and other professionals embracing project management as the most significant means to creating and executing successful projects.
I think that my friends and colleagues as well as my professional network find it hard to believe that from our humble beginnings we now have on average more than 150 participants attending our monthly lectures, and roughly 400 to 500 participants for our large events and conferences. Actually, how could I ever expect them to do so when even I am amazed when I look back on all we have created over the past decade!
My role throughout the first decade of our life has been that of an advocate (actually that of a preacher!) of project management. As such, it was in my blood to go into the public and private sectors to meet as many people as I could to spread the word. My very first opportunity to speak with a well-established global entity was when I received an invitation from IBM-Taiwan in late 2001. Frankly speaking, I was flattered to have been invited to talk to such experienced and well-trained project managers. This, in turn, gave me more confidence and encouragement to continue to speak with such prestigious organizations.
Following my rewarding IBM experience, I was then able to speak to many other experienced professionals at a wide range of multinational companies including TSMC (the world largest semiconductor company), HP-Taiwan, Microsoft-Taiwan, Trend Micro, During the past ten years, I have been invited by more than 140 enterprises, government agencies, schools, and communities to speak about project management. In sharing my knowledge, vision, insights, and experiences, I further succeeded in achieving my self-imposed mission for the project management advocacy and promotion.
In this chapter I tell many stories about how and what I have spoken to the enterprises and government agencies for developing PMITW/NPMA’s reputation, as well as the value of project management. I also describe how touched I have been by the support and encouragement I have received from corporate CEOs, governors, mayors, legislators, and other well-known persons who have listened to my presentations.
To my English readers, please kindly accept my humble apologies that due to some of the limitations of this book, we were not able to provide English translations to these Chinese stories.
