Project Managers at EDS are busy modeling cars out of vegetables. One member of each team is chalking out a plan while the rest are trying to find a mechanism to fix the parts. Vasanthi Suresh stands supervising the teams. ‘Attrition’-she announces. And the teams grumble while a member moves out. This was her PM 3-I approach in her previous role as the Project Support Office Leader at EDS India, before taking over her current role of a Resourcing Manager with them.

A simple tool like a Vacation Planner was designed by a Project Manager (PM) who used this to manage his team when a member took off from work. Suresh soon realized that each PM had his own set of good practices and expertise in handling projects assigned to him or her. Unfortunately, these talents were confined only to that particular team; they needed to be leveraged across other managers so as to help the larger organization. Hence, her team brainstormed and initiated the PM 3-Is that holds innovative programs every quarter.

To start with, the first month had the PM Interconnect, a newsletter encompassing the success stories of organizational leaders and PMs. The second month had a forum called PM Interact wherein PMs were divided into five groups, given a problem and asked to solve it using their own techniques, like the “vegetable-car-modeling game”. The third month witnessed PM Instruct. Here, a subject matter expert addressed Project Managers on different project management areas. She elucidates, “A manager who handles a lot of risk related activities addresses the team on this. For a database administrator team in EDS it’s the most critical activity.”

Each PM introduced their individual technique and in the end all the managers learnt four new techniques of problem solving apart from their own. “We’ve learnt that the teams have, individually and collectively, started using these new techniques scientifically and it has solved problems efficiently,” explains Suresh.

The end of this project’s first trimester found managers networking a great deal within the organization. Suresh’s team observed that knowledge sharing grew leaps and bounds at EDS India.