Project Management Institute Personas
These are the personas our UX team worked with at PMI. They were the first versions and developed prior to me joining the team. I contributed to implementing and testing our personas and synthesizing results, as well as promoting additional ways they could be developed and used to support design decisions.
My suggestions for advancing our persona efforts
I suggested we continue to create personas for our new ProjectManagement.com platform and for the redesign of the Continuing Certification Reporting System (CCRS), as they had a more select group of users with more specific reasons for engaging in a project management social media site or needing to use our application to maintain their PMI credentials.
Successful persona efforts are ones that are designed to solve specific problems for specific organizations and specific products. That is, personas created for one product cannot be easily adopted for another product within the company. Therefore, it's important to know what particular problems you want to solve with your personas and why it may be necessary to create different sets of personas to address different problems. There is also no one type or format for a persona that fits every product that needs to be designed. Depending on how the organization relates to its users, it may be appropriate to structure research and synthesis in terms of user roles, user goals, and/or user segments. For any of these categories, you will need to understand the needs, goals and mindsets of an individual, as well as their behavior. Goals and behavior are the most crucial components, as these often change over time or in different contexts. For successful product design, we need to know what people do, why they do it, what frustrates them, what gives them satisfaction and makes them feel good, and what they don't care about.
