Summary
How old is your smartphone? Less than a year or older? And how old is your knowledge?
By Peter Roth, July 12, 2023
According to a current ZHAW study, the Swiss buy a new mobile phone every three years.
But how often do you invest in refreshing your knowledge? Maybe several times a year on a smaller topic, every 2 years something bigger and once or twice in your life in a comprehensive further education? Many companies actively support the training and further education of their employees with their own training courses and external further education courses in order to learn new things.
But I notice that people and even entire organizations no longer refresh the methods they have learned and applied and are still up to date 10, 15 or even 20 years ago. It is better to do something completely new than to update the existing and tried and tested. Training or refresher courses on the same subject doesn't seem very attractive or rewarded when in fact it's updating our own assets/skills.
No wonder a project management version from the noughties no longer adequately supports the current challenges, which means that project management is generally considered outdated. Even an iPhone 3 from 2009 no longer meets today's requirements by far, but the current version all the more.
Actually, really new, revolutionary approaches rarely come onto the market. Much more, the methods like smartphones are constantly evolving, modularly integrate generally applicable, proven modules, methods and techniques and adapt to current trends such as agility and new work. As an example: The first edition of the PMI PMBOK Guide was published in 1996. After that, a new edition appeared every 4 years, maximum 5 years. The last Edition 7 was published in 2021 and made a 90-degree turn towards an adaptive, customer- and value-centric design, which supports and controls both sequential (waterfall), agile and hybrid project processing. The development can be observed in a similar way with other PM methods, but also with ITIL, Scrum, SAFe, leadership, architecture, etc.
That's why it makes sense not only to invest regularly in a new smartphone, but also to refresh one's own knowledge or the institutionalized knowledge of the organization. Bring your personal knowledge and that of your organization up to date. Invest in your skills and maintain your assets. It is worth it!