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While I was unemployed I was allowed to select and follow a free 6 week course – I chose to join a course on project management. In my point of view, understanding project management is a very important part of being an information architect. I believe it is important that the information architect is able to bridge the gap between decision makers, developers and users. I am already experienced in considering and working together with all of these people but I realized that I needed some more practical tools that let me understand how projects are managed, lead and understood in “the real world” – outside university. This is the main reason why I decided to join the course on project management – and of course I also realized that it could not hurt to add this course to my CV 
The main thing that interest me about project management is how people collaborate and innovate towards a common goal. The process of establishing and motivating a project group to be innovative is on the other hand not easy. I did however discover that the knowledge I had from my study about creativity and innovation was fitting perfectly with my new knowledge about project management. In this relation I am of course mostly thinking about the creative and innovative semesters that I had at my bachelor in Informatics. At these semesters we focussed on finding methods that stimulate creativity and innovation. This stimulation is also relevant to my candidate study Information Architecture as the development of web solutions may also benefit from the ability to be innovative.
It is therefore very natural for me to see the project management course as an opportunity to combine my studies in yet another way. When following this course I stumbled upon an article that in some sense have become an eye opener to me. The article is about how Pixar establish their project groups in order to motivate and cultivate innovation in the project group. One of the main suggestions of this article is that the project group should have teammembers with conflicting ideas, as this moves teammembers to the edge of their comfort zone. It is at the edge of our comfort zones that we become effective at being innovative because we all have an urge to find solutions that makes us return to our comfort zone. This made me realize that this was exactly what I had been observing throughout my creative semesters at the Informatics semester.
Another thing that I found interesting in relation to the project management course is projects about change (For more on this topic I suggest reading the book Leading change by John P. Kotter). In the last projects at my candidate study I chose to focus on the topic of Strategy for Change and I realized that this is extremely relevant for an information architect. As an information architect you have to work with development of websites, but in many cases the changes that can be proposed extend beyond the website. When developing Intranets we need to change the employees work flow. In marketing projects the development of a new website needs to be considered in relation to other marketing goals, and the overall business strategy, and in this relation it is also very necessary to understand that the changes that needs to be done to a website may require changes to an overall business strategy.
All in one I found the course to be very interesting and relevant to me. It in some sense helped me to apply a helicopter perspective and understand how to combine some aspects of my education in a way that makes sense when planning and conducting project work in a real life organization – now it’s just time to try it all out in my new job 
My new job will be presented in my next blog post… (very soon)