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15 November 2022
Project work: the last step of the International MBA path

I started the Part-Time International MBA at POLIMI Graduate School of Management two years ago without really understanding how this experience could change my point of view about my career, the company I work for, the way I connect with other people, how I solve work and personal problems, and even how I live my life daily.
I have met some wonderful and very interesting people during this journey. I have met some extremely smart and funny students, and professors who are really enthusiastic about their subjects, which makes their lectures very interesting. I met a coordinator who quickly found the perfect solution for every problem that tens of students had the imagination to put on the table. I really believe that every encounter in my life can give me something unique, and I have therefore enjoyed living the last two years taking the best I could from every single moment I spent with all these people, a lesson from every chat, an insight from every meeting intended to prepare for an exam, a note every time that somebody solved a very complex problem in an instant.
I tried to get the best out of every day and I think this affected me a lot — I am a different person now, and I understood this clearly when I selected a specific topic for the Project Work.
As far as the Part-Time International MBA is concerned, the school gives two different options: preparing a business plan for a new business idea and presenting it to the school, or preparing a development project for the company the student is working for. The two cases follow different processes. The former starts with all the students developing and presenting to the whole class a sales pitch to describe their own idea and convincing the others that is worthy of further development. The school and the students evaluate them and select the best ones while forming the working groups.
The individual PW, on the other hand, is mainly defined with the company and agreed in terms of content and purpose; it is, in any case, protected by an NDA between the student, company and business school.
I realized that what I want to be in my future career is the project manager of complex projects, i.e. the ones with great scope, involving multiple disciplines and hundreds of vendors, and engaging a big team. So, I contacted the head of the project managers’ (and directors’) group, and together we defined some rough, preliminary guidelines. I left his office with a lot of ideas and the will to capitalize on them for both me and the company.
I used this opportunity to dig into the PM’s role in the petrochemical and Oil & Gas markets. By interviewing several project managers, vice presidents and managers of different functions in the company, I tried to define a path forward to improve projects’ sustainability, a topic that has always interested me: green project management.
So, over some months and while continuing to prepare for the final exams, I developed a series of recommendations and applicable guidelines split by function and covering a typical project task force, to show clearly where the opportunities of sustainability are hidden inside each single project.
Thanks to the help I received from the tutor assigned to me by POLIMI GSoM, and after going through several pieces of research, I managed to organize the information I had received and explain my own ideas on the topic. Last July, I successfully presented the project in front of the evaluating committee, completing my MBA.
Thanks to this experience, I had the chance to study and gain a better understanding of how the company I work for is structured and how such big projects are carried out, better defining my career expectations and the right way to fulfil them. I consider the time I spent developing my project work as my own way of applying what I had studied during the Master in my employer’s business, improving its processes. At the time, I chose the Part-Time MBA because I wanted to impact positively on my work reality and the project work I had the chance to develop is just the beginning of a journey of personal growth that will get me closer and closer to my goals.