The Art of Project Management: A Story about Work and Passion

OR-AS, 2008, Mario Vanhoucke, Tom Van Acker and Stephan Vandevoorde at PMI Belgium:

After a successful evening with a presentation at a PMI Belgium chapter event together with my two closest friends Tom (OR-AS) and Stephan (Fabricom), I was talking to some PMI Belgium members at the reception about our work at OR-AS, about the results we have obtained, about the research, about our beautiful products and about the future intentions we have. You know, the usual stuff …

Until, all of a sudden, one of the members who I know already for years asked me why I always talk about what I have done, and not why I do it, and apparently keep doing.

Simple question! Because it is important for business. Because it leads to better projects. Because companies need more efficient tools and a higher return on investment on their projects. Because this is what I try to do: improving project management processes. After all, I was talking to someone from PMI Belgium, so I thought that would be a good answer.

But he wasn't satisfied with the answer. "I don't believe that this is the only reason why you do it", he said. "I want to know the real underlying reasons why you do the things you do".

Good question! But not a simple one. I couldn't find a reasonable answer. "Because it's my work" seemed to be a silly and incomplete answer, so I decided to ignore the question and offered him a drink.

But the question stayed in my mind, and after some time, I decided to summarise the many things I have done together with OR-AS and Fabricom and the many colleagues from the PM field, in the hope that I should find out why I do the things I do.

Quite recently, during a walk in London, I saw near St Pancras station a quote from Dame Anita Roddick "To succeed you have to believe in something with such a passion that it becomes a reality", and I immediately thought about the question at PMI Belgium a few years ago.

I don't know what "to succeed" exactly means to me, but I do know that this is exactly the reason why I do the things I do. I do them because it's my job, but also because I'm passionate about Project Management. Instead of writing about "what?" I do (in publications and my other books), I decided to write something about the "why?" in a short book titled "The Art of Project Management: A Story about Work and Passion", which is available as a free download as of March 14, 2013: Yes, indeed, it's my 40th birthday that day … That's why I thought: time to look back for a second and then go on.

I believe that the book might be relevant for my PM colleagues across the world, or for my PM students at the University or the Business School, or maybe for someone else I haven't met yet. You'll never know … And above all, it's written as a kind of a 'thank you' to all the people I worked with throughout the years.