Mary McKinlay, BA FAPM MIoD, is Managing Director of Mary McKinlay Projects Ltd, a Project Assessment and Training firm based in the UK. She is also currently an Adjunct Professor of Project Management at (ESC Lille) in Lille, France. For the past two years, she has been a Vice President and member of the Executive Board of the International Project Management Association (IPMA). Having worked in Project Management for almost 30 years as practitioner, researcher and trainer, Mary is a Project Management enthusiast who is often invited as a Conference speaker. Recent speaking engagements have included the IPMA World Congresses in Budapest, India, Shanghai, Krakow, and Rome; PM Tage in Vienna; Ukrainian PM Association conferences in Kiev; conferences in Dubai, Slovenia, Nizhny Novgorod (Russia), Vienna (Austria), and Lisbon (Portugal), and the APM Conferences in London. She has given workshops and tutorials all over the world. Following a degree in Systems Engineering, she started her career on the Tornado aircraft project and subsequently worked on many large defence programmes. A further dimension was added by participation in research programmes involving collaboration between industry and academics e.g. Alvey, SERC and ESPRIT. One of these projects was to generate a process model for Project Management using soft systems methodologies. This underlined the need for Project Management improvement and influenced her later work. Having trained in the use of the Project Excellence Model, Mary has acted as an assessor for the IPMA Awards since 2004. She has also jointly delivered Training Workshops for the Awards. She has been Governor of the University of Greenwich and is an active member of the UK Institute of Directors.
Editor’s Note: Mary McKinlay has been one of the most active and visible leaders of IPMA over the last two years, speaking at many conferences and traveling worldwide to promote professional project management. We had an opportunity to visit with Mary in both Rome and Helsinki during November 2008, then pose the questions below in December as her position on the IPMA Executive Board (ExBo) came to an end. Mary responded to the questions via email from Paris in early January.
PM World Today (PMWT): As this year comes to a close, and as your position on the IPMA Executive Board (ExBo) comes to an end, perhaps you can reflect a little on your IPMA experiences. To begin, what was your leadership role this year on the IPMA ExBo?
Mary McKinlay:My principal responsibilities were for Membership and Young Crew and then after Otto’s death I acquired the Project Excellence awards. Having started the initiative to look at the governance of IPMA, I have been responsible for the Governance Implementation Working Group. I have also been working with Veikko Valila on alliances e.g. with PMI and the International Centre for Complex Project Management (Previously the College of Complex Project Managers).
Read Complete Interview >>
