Reaching Synergy in Project Management

I am a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) since a dozen years and some of my colleagues were wondering why I bothered to seek another PM certification internal to Orange Business. In fact, I was very curious to see and test our internal certification process for PMs. I've been advocating for a long time that such internal certification programmes for PMs within companies are very worthwhile, so it was the opportunity for me to see one "de visu". 

Our internal PM methodology at Orange Business is called Synergy. Synergy has been developed to provide an organizational approach to the management of projects within Orange. It is a high-level project management method that offers a set of tools and techniques that are scalable and adaptable to all internal and external projects. The Synergy methodology is based on the Project Management Institute (PMI®) best-practice guidelines. These best-practice guidelines to project management, which are documented in the project management body of knowledge, have been tailored to meet the needs and culture of Orange Business.

The methodology defines what has to be delivered by the project management in terms of documents, templates and reports. This is precisely a key area where the internal training and certification surpasses the plain vanilla training. Instead of learning all best practices for each PM domain of competency, the courses are focused on the ones that best apply to our environment. The project deliverables seen during the training sessions and made available to PMs cover all aspects of project planning, execution, and handover in the life cycle of a contract.

An additional key benefits for the Orange Business professional PMs and their customers are that they get access to a standard set of templates for all of the key project documents and tools: project, project management plan, planning, risks and issues register and opportunity assessment, project scope management plan, WBS diagrams examples, deliverables control matrix...

Equipped with a method, documents and templates that have been specifically tailored to our products and services, as a PM, I left this 3 days course fully operational rather than not only trained on the theory and best practices of Project Management.

So, attending this course really confirmed my belief that internal certification paths for PMs (in addition to industry ones) are very worthy the time and expenses.

...and I successfully passed the certification exam !