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Jim Owens was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and has been living in Perth, Western Australia since 1984.
Jim Owens FACS CP PMP BSc PRINCE2 edit
Occupation edit
Jim is a career Project Manager, presenter and trainer (mainly in PMI's PMP certification) and earned his PMP (Project Management Professional) certification in July 1998, when there where just over 11,000 PMP's in the world (today there are over 215,000).
Currently he is working with the West Australian Government, as a Project Manager with the Department of Health.
Jim is also:
- An Accredited SFIA Consultant,
- A Fellow of the ACS (Australian Computer Society)
- Honorary Secretary of ACS, Western Australia,
- Editor of the ACS WA magazine Offline,
- Columnist with PMHub
- Director of Intelligent Development Services (Training)
- Tutor and course author with ACS Professional Year
- IT Industry curriculum advisor to Edith Cowan University (ECU)
- Chair of the School of Computer & Security Science Consultative Committee, ECU
- Chair of Telecommunication Society of Australia (WA)
- Founder of PromotePM.org [1] "The Home of Project Management", a site dedicated to to free, or low cost, project management tools and information.
- Previously Vice President PMI WA Chapter
Prior to this, he was the Manager for Planning, Projects and Research, at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, where he also held the position of “Gartner Research Seat”.
Hobbies edit
- Project management
- Teaching project management and training project managers for the PMP exam
- Public speaking
- Photography
- Cooking
- He had some chef training many years ago, and he still enjoy cooking at any opportunity.
- Poetry
- Jim prefers writing poetry to reading it, as it is a way of expressing his feelings.
- Story writing
- Writing magazine articles
- A frequent author of project management (and other) articles as a columnist on PMHub. JIm also writes magazine articles. For example, here's an article he wrote for the Information Age magazine [2].
- Walking
- Gardening
- Hydroponics
- Electronics
- Anything computer related
- Robotics
- Frogs
- Jim says, Frogs are great and they are a measure of the health of our environment, but they need our help to survive. A few years ago he built a frog pond in a very dry, sandy corner of his back garden, which produces about one hundred Motorbike Frogs per year. He is a moderator of an Australian frog conservation forum.
- Turtles
- Jim has for some years been interested in the long-necked turtles of Western Australia. You can see some of his pictures of them, and a short video, on a site he created for the Curtin University Environment Awareness Team (CEAT and on a turtle site in Slovakia. Soon the pictures will be appearing in a magazine in Japan.
Fish breeding In Ireland, Jim bred many thousands of tropical fish, such as angelfish, guppies and platties, but nowadays he breeds just Western Pygmy Perch (Indigenous to Southwest Western Australia), as these little fish are “frog friendly” (but downright mosquito unfriendly).
Western Pygmy Perch Male, with breeding colors
Work Background edit
Jim Owens has been a Project Manager, IT manager and consultant, mainly in software development in the finance sector, for about twenty-five years and a presenter and trainer for almost as long.
Graduating from Queens University Belfast, where he studied computer science, mathematics and physics. he completed his three-year articles in Chartered Accountancy, but found it too dull for his personality, and so moved into the IT industry as a programmer, then business analyst and Project Manager.
During the last twenty-five years Jim has managed many projects across the world for companies in Britain, Ireland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, the US, Australia, and the Philippines in IT, implementation, organizational development, operations, policy development, annual reporting, and quality planning. He have worked in-house and contract, and as a consultant, serving major organizations, including banks, financial institutions, universities, government and others.