This interview is the first of a series with some members of the Peruvian PM Community. These interviews are intended to provide some more personal and relevant information about the PM world in Peru. Luis Alfredo Chepote is a Peruvian entrepreneur and a member of the Project Management Institute (PMI®) and the PMI Government Specific Interest Group (GovSIG). Some public and private projects managed by him have been recognized with awards, and today he is one of the main characters in the Peruvian project management community who better combines many disciplines. I have met Luis Alfredo Chepote through the PMI GovSIG and we have now developed together many project management training and promotion projects.
PMWT: In recent years, two of your projects have received awards and recognitions for the successes they achieved.
Luis Alfredo Chepote: Yes, by 2001, I was involved in an IT project which had as final deliverable an integrated system for container load management for an important maritime agent in the US, who decided to outsource this complex system to a Peruvian company. This system was recognized with the Corporate Creativity Award in 2001. Afterwards in 2006, for General Elections for Presidency of Peru, I was assigned for the Electoral Ethics Pact project, an initiative from the National Elections Agency obtaining the Award for Best Government Practices by Ciudadanos al Día (www.ciudadanosaldia.org, see the news). Also, Lloyd Axworthy, Chief of the Mission of Observers from the OAS, recommended to replicate the initiativefor elections in all countries in the Region. The OAS General Secretary, Jose Miguel Insulza, recognized this program as an important initiative for the promotion of electoral ethics.
PMWT: Do you think project management has been involved to obtain these distinctions?
Luis Alfredo Chepote: I think it was a very important factor. But I should be clear saying that there is a need for leadership, conviction of what you are doing and professional ethics, because you are the head of the team and the example to follow. In my university training as Bachelor in Computing Sciences at the School of Business at Florida Atlantic University (1986) I had no courses of project management in the study plan. Neither at ESAN www.esan.edu.pe (1994), rich in many concepts and tools, but without driving you to develop capacities to manage projects. These I found lately at specialization courses (IT Project Management – ESAN) where authors like Sprague, Pressman, Rakos among others showed me a clearer North. It is because I won the Corporate Creativity Award in 2001 with the WTS which opened to me the possibility to search for better project management practices. That was because the BST (blood, sweat and tears) methodology was too expensive in both the emotional and economical sense. It is clear that the PMBOK greatly influenced all my projects from then on, including especially the Electoral Ethics Pact in 2006.
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