Kenneth Atwater, MPM, PMP, PMI-SP
Service Productivity Leader, GE Healthcare Information Technology Solutions
Teaching field: Project Management

Where I come from

My undergraduate degree was in education, but when I graduated in the middle of a recession, no one was hiring teachers. I found a job in industry and through various job changes and promotions, ended up working as a project manager in information technology.

In 1993, the company I worked for had some big, complex projects that were going badly because they exceeded our ability to manage them. I began looking at graduate programs that offered project management training. Keller was one of the few schools that offered a Master of Project Management degree. It was taught by practitioners, and it was just what I needed to be effective in my job.

My MPM opened doors for me. Subsequently, I started and staffed the project management office at Xerox Global services. I managed the Executive Program at NCR, delivering project management training to company executives and acting as an internal consultant on international projects and projects in need of rescue.

Crowning achievement

My stint at Xerox Global Services was a high point of my career. Rarely in business do you have the opportunity to manage something from scratch that you're passionate about, have the support of senior management, and run it with no one looking over your shoulder. I got the chance to apply what I learned at Keller, and it worked just like it was supposed to. That was thrilling. I saw what I had planned come to fruition.

My career has come full circle. I always wanted to teach, and now I teach what I'm passionate about. I have been teaching project management courses at Keller for over 10 years; I teach every PM course in the graduate academic catalog and have taught both online and onsite. My first instructor in project management at Keller, Rich Eillman, was my role model. He was an inspirational teacher - knowledgeable, experienced and personable. We have stayed friends, and he mentored me when I joined the faculty.

PMP A Valuable Credential

In addition to my master's degree, I earned the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI), the premier membership and credentialing association for the profession. My Keller courses helped me pass the exam the first time, when the national pass rate was 50%.

I'm extremely proud of my PMP certification and my foresight in seeking it years ago. PMI numbers certifications sequentially. Mine is #7076. Since then a quarter of a million other professionals around the world have earned the distinction PMP. When I was a hiring manager, I put the resumés of credentialed applicants on the short stack. I encourage my students to get certified--and show them job descriptions that require it.

I am actively involved in PMI. I've written three articles for PM Network magazine, which are a blend of theory and practice - the heart of the matter in project management. I've been on the PMI executive committee and helped to rewrite the PMP exam.

What I bring to class

Over the last 20 years, I have managed $80 million construction projects and $100 million software projects, hardware deployments, and international projects. I've worked most of the time for Fortune 500 companies, sometimes for smaller companies. I also teach some courses at GE.

All that experience comes into the classroom with me. I practice what I teach and I teach what I practice.

My teaching style is very interactive. I aim to talk only 25% of the time, and have the students talking the rest of the time. I'm big on practical case studies, sometimes stories in the news. Teamwork is essential in project management, so I assign teams to formulate presentations. There are two parts to gaining mastery: knowing the content and communicating it effectively. It doesn't do you much good to know it if you can't communicate it.

Get rattled and get over it

In the real world, when you make a project proposal or give a status report, the executives want to question you. My goal is to simulate, as much as possible in the classroom, what really happens on the job. During presentations, there sometimes is an executive who tries to make you sweat, tries to rattle you. You don't want that to happen for the first time on the job. So I try to prepare my students for that event and teach them how to handle themselves.

This is especially true in the capstone project. Students are given a really involved project scenario and take it from soup to nuts - from selling it to executives to developing the plan, schedule, and risk assessment. In the scenario, an unexpected event occurs - as in most projects. At the end of the course, I gather an audit team of my colleagues - all certified professionals who have been working in the field for 10 or 15 years. Students present to the audit team. Part of that is explaining what went wrong with the project and how they are going to fix it.

Why Keller?

What sets Keller apart is that courses are taught by and for working professionals. I went to Keller in the middle of some crazy work projects, and I left every class with something that helped me on the job the next day. On the other hand, I took a couple of e-commerce courses at another graduate school. Academically, the instructor was top notch - he'd written books, and gone to the best schools, but he had absolutely no practical experience. We wanted to know how to apply what he was teaching to our work situations, and he did not know how to bridge that gap.

The master's degree program at Keller is tailored for the working adult who wants an advanced degree specifically to advance his or her career. There are people who aren't so focused in their choice, and a different degree program might be better for them. But for those seeking a practical education as a path to career advancement, Keller is the place to go.