Day #37: 130 Top Project Management Influencers of 2019

It looks like this week is all about rankings! Today we bring a list of 130 Top Management Influencers of 2019, from the expert website The Digital Project Manager. According to them, this list includes the brightest minds and influential thinkers who are shaping the PM industry today. 

In my opinion, a list like this is too long. Do we really need to keep track of 130 brilliant mind each year? However, it can be good to keep as a reference and tool for future investigation in the field. For example, it was nice to find Jennifer Bridges in the 12th place. She is the director of ProjectManager.com, whose videos I have shared a couple of times in this blog.

But even nicer for me was to find Carlos J. Pampliega, from Spain, in the list. Actually in the 6th place! One tends to think that this kind of new sectors mostly appear in the US, yet there are powerful thinkers from all around the world and at local scales.

Long rankings are a bit too much, but there is always valuable information in them. Image from universityintheusa.com

Day #36: Top 50 Most Influential Projects of the Last 50 Years

A couple of weeks ago, PMI announced the top 50 notable and influential projects of the past 50 years. It is the first time that PMI publishes a ranking of this kind, and the goal is to highlight the relevance of PM.

The idea was to recognize projects that have transformed their sectors and the business landscape, from healthcare to technology and from entertainment to finance. There are iconic achievements such as Apollo 11 or the Human Genome Project, but the top place of the list is for the creation of the World Wide Web.

50 projects were chosen from more than 1,000 projects identified by 400 experts in PM, including PMI members, academic and industry experts. The list is part of the PMI 50th anniversary celebration, and there are some extra runner ups apart from the main list. 

More information together with the full list can be found here, but some of the most "unexpected" ones are:

• Alibaba® Singles Day – For creating the largest e-commerce day in the world and fundamentally shifting how people shop.
• Burj Khalifa – For standing tall as a symbol of economic diversification in the Middle East
• Harry Potter® Books – For making reading cool – and that’s just the beginning of the magic
• Chernobyl Cleanup – For mitigating the world’s worst nuclear plant disaster – twice

and one that we already mentioned in this blog!

• E-Estonia – For building the world’s first digital country

Sydney Opera House, one of the awarded projects. Image from tripadvisor.com

Panama Channel, one of the awarded projects. Image from britannica.com