Not Back to the Future - Anonymous employee Project Management Institute Employee Review

The IT department is steeped in politics and personal growth is difficult to achieve because the metrics for success are not based on what you can achieve but instead on who you are aligned with. Several IT consulting companies have been contracted to review the PMI IT department providing many recommendations for improvement with the result being senior management cherry picking and applying changes that only push people out of their positions. To demonstrate how misguided senior management is, the entire IT department was recently required to be certified in ITIL practices, trained and certified. To date no measurable improvement or benefit to the company has been realized. The time and money spent on this endeavor might as well be flushed down the toilet as ITIL has not been communicated or shared with the rest of the company and cannot succeed if practiced in a vacuum. There is no high level system architecture or senior management recognition of the need skilled personnel to create and govern one. In its place are third party vendors that are only interested in completing their projects by applying their own architecture resulting in new technical debt for the company. Through the lack of any coherent systems architecture or governance PMI continues to create a fractured unmanageable IT environment. The IT department is heavily loaded with project managers and business analysts that greatly outnumber the technical staff reinforcing a culture of many queen bees with few if any worker bees. Senior management will say it is focused on operational excellence and then will often agree to complete projects deemed important by the businesses within PMI generating arbitrary project timelines that do not consider resource availability or technical debt reduction. The overall result of this very visible lack of senior leadership is driving highly skilled and qualified personnel out of the organization and preventing PMI from ever reaching a state of operational excellence.