Chapter News

Sometimes, to understand where you are and where you should be going, it’s important to understand where you have come from. As founding fathers, René Vielvoije, Jan Vermeijs and Anton Zandhuis we were asked to share some insights into the Chapter’s history. This is part two of the story which provides insight into PMI Netherlands Chapter´s 20 years journey.

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While the Netherlands Chapter was in the initiation process, the Chapter worked with the Benelux Chapter to coordinate  activities.  This was helpful for both our new Chapter  and was appreciated by the Benelux Chapter.  Yes, we started out using Agile methods!. Following the goal of “do what you say and learn while practicing”. The local events created the right momentum and platform for the next steps.  The confirmation of the business case and continued efforts saw our Chapter growth continue.

When reading back through the minutes of the meeting of the Steering committee, some things caught our attention:

Are projects always running late? Not this time!

 Because we walked our talk.  The Netherlands Chapter foundation was initially 1/1/2002. The official founding of the Chapter was 23 August 2001 - ½ a year earlier than the originally scheduled deadline. Maybe it was because as PMP’s we were all properly trained by Louis Mercken into putting the PMBOK Guide processes. into practice! Nevertheless, we worked as a small team and focused on being effective and efficient.

Working in a team of three it’s clear that when something needs to be done it’s “you” who has to do it (simply because there are no others to do it…). Also, we decided early on what each of our roles would be (Chair, Treasurer, Secretary).  Being such a small but well-targeted team, it was then relatively easy to agree on our to-do’s and for getting them executed. Again, a very Agile approach.

Membership data transferred by a floppy-disk

Those were the days that simple transfer via the web of big files (we’re talking about less than the bit-size of a picture now taken by your mobile) was not yet really possible, so floppy disks were exchanged frequently. For the younger members, if you don’t know what a floppy disk looks like: Google it!

PMI Chapter Website – a constant topic of attention

The minutes reveal: “Set up of the NL Chapter website; Discussed with Louis Mercken and file of website received; however site is changed a lot in conformance with the new PMI-worldwide website; René will request Louis to send the new file; action will be passed on to newly elected board member, responsible for the site management.”

Thanks to Gerrit Strijbis, our first Director of communications, thus also our webmaster, this action point was closed. It confirms again that the set-up and daily maintenance of our Chapter website, is not an easy job.  But it is an important job as the website it our “window to the world”. 

On  behalf of all the members, our sincere appreciation for the volunteers past, current and future for ensuring the continuous management of the Chapter website!

And …. some good ideas simply don’t change

As a ‘thank you’ gift for Karel de Bakker’s Chapter presentation, we decided to buy some bottles of good wine. The notes revealed that from then on, wine should be our ‘standard gift’ for thanking the presenters. At a certain moment, we even arranged wine bottles with a special label showing our PMI NL Chapter logo. Later, in return for our Chapter initiatives and presentations the ‘Founding fathers’ received several bottles for their efforts. Based on that, we still believe this was one of the best decisions we ever made when starting the Chapter 😊.

Another story worth sharing is the formal issuing of the Charter at PMI HQ. René Vielvoije, the Chapter President, was present at the Global PMI Congress where the PMI Netherlands Chapter would get our Charter. All new Chapters were mentioned except the PMI Netherlands Chapter because the organizing committee thought we were not present. Louis Mercken and Karel de Bakker let all present know we were present and ready to get our charter.  Following the meeting, René received the Charter, along with the apologies of staff and Board Members. However, a nice side effect was that as a Chapter we were immediately well known at PMI Headquarters and had established some personal connections. Always useful!

So, the Chapter was up and running. And then what happened?

The chapter started growing, and very fast indeed! We started in August 2001 with 159 members, who were transferred from the PMI Benelux Chapter. But in June 2002 we already had doubled our membership to  328.  It was clear that the chapter had potential, and this was especially due to the internationally driven organizations: Project Managers now had access to PMI locally and could interact with their peers.

However, the initiation of the PMI Netherlands Chapter immediately created an issue in the Dutch project management community. In the previous article we already mentioned the ‘Project Management Instituut’, as an already existing PM association in The Netherlands. So now we had two two professional associations with rather similar names. The ‘Project Management Instituut’, in short PMI, but linked to global IPMA, and the PMI Netherlands Chapter, linked to the global Project Management Institute, in short PMI. So, it didn’t take long for PMI (the IPMA one) to respond to this, first in the form of a rather formal (legal) statement that we better change our name. When chartering the Chapter, we already had some discussions about this topic when we realized this potentially confusing situation. But we then reasoned that the name of every PMI Chapter in the world had this rather straightforward structure: ‘PMI’ + ‘location’ (could be city, region, nation, etc) + ‘Chapter’. So, one didn’t need to have too much creativity to come up with the rather straightforward Chapter name: ‘PMI Netherlands Chapter’. Luckily, PMI had the PMI trademark well protected worldwide, so with hindsight, the rather illogical choice of an IPMA-related association, branding itself in the Netherlands as PMI, was reconsidered, rather quickly during a meeting initiated by the IPMA-NL board of directors, together with our Board and IPMA-NL was used going forward. But an additional outcome of this meeting was increased appreciation of each other’s ideas and personalities.  Resulting in the recognition that, although we were both aiming at being the professional PM community of choice, our target groups were, in fact, different: IPMA-NL as a more national oriented, Dutch-speaking, PM community, and PMI Netherlands Chapter for the more international and English speaking PM community.

In practice both associations tried to support PMs and grow the recognition of Project Management as a profession.  While there were still loads of undiscovered PM’s in The Netherlands, surviving ‘in the wild’, with no professional support or reference at all, there was plenty of membership potential. This meant that IPMA-NL and PMI Netherlands Chapter could coexist and even support each other. This initial meeting even resulted in the agreement of offering the opportunity for members of both associations to participate in each other’s events, under the same conditions as a member. This agreement and the warm relationship between IPMA-NL and PMI Netherlands Chapter resulted in many collaborative sessions later, to the benefit of all members of both associations, and this continues today!  

A lot of creativity was used, however, for designing the new logo for our PMI Netherlands Chapter logo. Like all local PMI Chapters, having some characteristic and easily recognizable symbol for their region, the tulips in our Chapter logo of course act as a symbol for our Dutch roots. But they also reflect the goal of our local Chapter: to support the continuous professional growth and flowering of its members and the Dutch PM community as a whole.

           

The Chapter Board received many compliments for this design, and it is rewarding to see that, 20 years later and 2 designs later, the logo still has its recognizable three tulips!

The PMI Netherlands Chapter was flowering. If you want to know how it developed further? Then wait for the next episode! To be continued ….