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Cindy Anderson, VP Brand Management at PMI

Today, we welcome Cindy Anderson (LinkedIn Profile) who is the VP, Brand Management at Project Management Institute (PMI)®.

This interview was recorded at the PMI® Global Conference 2019 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. We'll talk about the elements of PMI's new brand and the fact that there is a lot more to it than "just" a new logo. And that's an important distinction. While the new logo is what most of us see, the new brand and its slogan/positioning "Powering the Project Economy" are so much more than just a few new visual assets.

In the interview, we talk about how the new brand was developed and how it affects the many stakeholders around the world.

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Episode Transcript

Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only.

Podcast Introduction

Cornelius Fichtner: In this episode of The Project Management Podcast™, we learn that PMI’s new brand is about substantially more than just a new and very cool logo.

Hello and welcome back to The Project Management Podcast™ at www.pmpodcast.com. I am Cornelius Fichtner. We are coming to you live from the hallways here at the 2019 PMI Global Conference in Philadelphia.

Podcast

Cornelius Fichtner: And with me right now sitting at a lovely little coffee table isCindy Anderson. Good morning, Cindy!

Cindy Anderson: Hi! Good morning, Cornelius.

Cornelius Fichtner: How are you doing? How is the conference going for you?

Cindy Anderson: Oh my gosh, it is amazing. This is our 50th year as I’m sure that your listeners know and we have had a great time celebrating the past of PMI, 50 years history and also looking forward to the next 50 years and starting the future. So it’s day one for PMI today.

Cornelius Fichtner: What is your role within PMI?

Cindy Anderson: Sure! I am the Vice President of Brand Management. So I lead the Brand team, which is responsible for the topic we are going to talk about today.

Cornelius Fichtner: Yeah, and I’m pretty sure many people will already have seen the new logo and if you haven’t seen it yet, just visit www.pmi.org and the new logo is there. But let’s begin a little bit higher up here. Why is PMI undertaking a brand refresh?

Cindy Anderson: I’m glad you asked that to start this conversation, Cornelius, because many people find that the logo is a company’s brand, and it’s part of it. But it certainly is not all of it.

If we think back a little bit to the founding of PMI 50 years ago, Jim Snyder who is the founder of PMI will tell you that he was talking with his colleagues about the way work was changing about the new tools and processes that were being used. And I don’t know if you know this but we were almost called the American Planning and Scheduling Society. But when Jim looked at the broader picture of the way that work was changing, he and his colleagues said: We should just name this organization what it’s going to be even if it isn’t that yet.

So they had an incredible foresight, an incredible vision of what the future of work might look like and they took that opportunity. We feel like we’re in the same position today. We see the way work is changing or the way work is done is changing, the skills and capabilities and the knowledge that project managers have to have is expanding and broadening and ways that we couldn’t even have imagined 50 years ago. So we what we wanted to do was carry on our founder’s vision and foresight and really look forward and say: How can we best prepare PMI to represent the vast group of stakeholders that count on us to deliver for them and to help their organization to understand the value of project management How can we create an identity of visual expression, a position, a personality that would encompass all of those new ways of working, all of the generations that are now in the workforce and really look forward to the next half century of PMI.

Cornelius Fichtner: Powering the project economy is front center of www.pmi.org. Is that where we now stand?

Cindy Anderson: That is where we now stand. So PMI powers the project economy and we believe that that’s relevant for our entire stakeholder base because as I mentioned the way that we work is changing. We’re incorporating artificial intelligence and big data into everything that we do. Humans and machines are working together in so many different ways whether it’s just data augmentation or whether there are actually are actual computers and machines working alongside people.

Quantum computing is becoming a real thing and that requires a real differencein the way that project managers do their work and the way that organizations organize to be able to take advantage of opportunities in the market. So when we think of things like the gig economy. We’ve all heard of the gig economy, right, which is all of these young millennials that are out there going job to job to job because they do not want to have a career or our society isn’t set up for people to have long careers anymore. We think that that’s just part of a much broader conversation that we call the project economy. And we think that because, we’ll talk a little bit more I think about some of the research that we’ve done to get to this place. But we believe that powering the project economy is the way that our stakeholders, our project managers, our project workers are going to help organizations be successful in society in the future.

Cornelius Fichtner: Excellent segway because the next question on my list is Survey Says. I attended a presentation that you gave. It’s a blur. Was it yesterday? Was it two days ago? I don’t remember. Well, I’m really melting into the next.

So I attended your presentation and in that, you talked about the many surveys you did and the feedback you got from the membership and stakeholders. Who did you reach out to?

Above are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Please subscribe to our Premium Podcast to receive a PDF transcript.