Remembering Eric Jennett
Pictured here is Eric Jennett receiving the Jim O-Brien Lifetime Achievement Award from Jim himself. The Award is given annually by the PMI Scheduling Community for significant lifetime contribution to the scheduling profession.
I first met Eric Jennett at the 5th Annual PMI College of Scheduling conference in Chicago in 2008. Eric was the recipient of the Jim O’Brien Lifetime Achievement award.
I had heard of PMP #1, however I was now talking to the man, sitting in awe with Eric following the award dinner. Not only was I talking to the man that started it all, but everything he was now saying to me still made sense, some 40 years later. Eric was a key driving force behind the growth of an organization that 40 year later grew more than 350 times their wildest expectations (that red-line on the chart below is an exponential curve overlaid on 40 years of membership growth at PMI) … Project Managers can sometimes be extremely conservative in their estimates.
This graphic illustrates the exponential growth of PMI over the past 4 decades. This growth was largely fueled by the PMP certification, for which Eric Jennett was officially the first… PMP #1.
Sure there have been thousands of others along the way that have contributed to the growth and development of PMI, however I believe that Eric Jennett is the Project Management equivalent of Henry Ford …. Eric set the wheels in motion and we all got in our cars and followed ….
Doc Dochtermann is a Vice President at Advisicon. Doc is currently the Marketing & Communications Lead for the PMI Scheduling Community of Practice (SCoP). You can learn more about the Scheduling Community by visiting http://scheduling.vc.pmi.org/.
Oh yeah, fbauolus stuff there you!