PMFORUM Breaking News
Breaking News in the Project Management World
Monday, November 17, 2008
PM Forum Achieves 5th Anniversary Milestone in Bucharest
Reported by Florin Gheorghiu,PMP in Romania
CODECS-OPEN UNIVERSITY along with PMI Romania Chapter and backed up by a group of sponsors hosted, as in every year at the beginning of November, the PM Forum Project Management day, an event addressed to those in or having relations with Project Management in Romania.
The SAS Radisson Hotel in Bucharest welcomed the invitees, over a hundred practitioners, members of training institutes and academia, and representatives from various industries on the morning of 4th of November 2008. With them, distinguished keynote speakers from across Europe and US took a seat at the conference center, some of them for the first time at the event while others turning into regular guests at PM events.
This year the two-day PM Forum benefited from the participation and high quality presentation delivered by Mr. Wayne Abba (pictured at right) from ABBA Consulting in the United States. Mr. Abba is a reputed consultant with long professional history with the US DoD on Governmental military and defense projects, mainly centered on Earned Value Management and Project Cost and Schedule performance management. For those in project management the workshop in which Mr. Abba was the presenter was more than about Earned Value Management’s concise application tailored for defense projects; he reviewed the main understanding of CPI, SPI and schedule and costs variances and how they should be used in Project Communication Management.
He also touched a very sensitive string of Code of Conduct when public monies are spent. Again, the presentation was more for those who could read between the lines to understand what was apparent but also for those familiar with more then simple Earned Value Methodology. This was the front displayed caption indeed, but Mr. Abba wanted to convey a subtler message for the audience and especially for those in touch with public funds: the obligation of disclosing the real facts and figures concerning the way the money is spent on governmental projects, ethics involved on each side, the contractors and the Government either if called DoD, DoE or other similar organisms in Europe or particularly in Romania. This is quite a hard issue to perceive even for those with some years in Project Management! That’s why with the next editions some invitees might get easily bored if not at the minimum acquaintance with the topics.
Jim de Piante parallelized the act of being a soccer coach for a kid’s team with the Project Management point of view on leadership skills. It was a vivid, humoristic yet serious speech that entertained the entire plenum audience for almost one hour, quite a time in tight schedule constraints. Behind the apparent frivolity of the topics one uninitiated could have thought it was, the cognizant in the Conference Hall easily recognized that some simple things in the life can prove themselves as sources of education and teaching. Again, Mr. De Piante’s presentation had had two facets: one for profanes who could have found the speech below the grade of event but with a lot of knowledge and symbols that professionals in project management could easily understand: the key words of Mr. De Piante’s moment was leadership and how this can work with project teams within the project management environment, applied for a team with specific skills.
The two giants on the software battlefield, Microsoft with its " Benefits of Microsoft EPM" presented by Mr. Claus Nielsen, and Primavera with a speech tailored on how its scheduling tool could put the PM at works and presented excellently by Mr. Giovanni di Folco from Techno Engineering & Associates, completed the first day of the Romanian PM Forum.
Other particular workshops on the first day included those in which Mr. Hans Aaaroe from Grontmij, a Danish based consulting company with present activities in the field of energy and consulting services, or Mr. Iustin Iavlev from ACTA Consulting &Audit who tackled the issue of deontology and ethics within EU financed projects. Mr. Chris Kindermanns the President of PMI Belgium, now a common figure in the Romanian PMI’s sessions, spoke to the audience about “ Competitiveness through Excellence,” while the Romanian PMI Chapter Mrs. Simona Bonghez advocated for the profession through her 20-minute, well-articulated, “ Selling Project Management” presentation.
Mr. Alex Rodrigues (pictured at left) from PMO Consulting International based in Lisbon, Portugal and PMI mentor for the 8th Region was the main attraction of the second day with his Risk Management Workshop. Since it is risky to ignore the risk so Mr. Rodrigues did in his speech: conveying the message that risk analysis is necessary in any project environment throughout the project lifecycle, it never stops until project completion. Mr. Rodrigues was for the second time in Romania at this level of representation, his first appearance being noted a year ago with the occasion of the fourth Romanian PM Forum.
Tracking back to the first PM Forum event, it is with no risk of mistake an abrupt upturn of the event’s overall quality from the first to the current 5th edition. More than that, the danger of not finding the minimum number of attendees with a minimum level of Project Management understanding concepts is really considerable for the next year event since with every year lapsed the topics and matters debated become more and more refined and highly inaccessible unless trained and educated properly in the field. Sophisticated mechanism of Earned Value methodology, scheduling techniques under any kind of software environment and by using CPM or PERT techniques, the Project Manager on the battlefield and how he/she could enlivens the project team by leadership skills are no longer for any audience.
With this last edition and from this point onward the public should become more refined when playing with concepts and notions. Even though a few of the same old figures were seen among the audience, along with them newcomers found their way to the event this year. Notwithstanding all the above, there is a bit of incompleteness while IPMA was not at all represented or present at this major event of the year. Not knowing exactly the affairs of the PM Forum sponsorship, it would have been great to have IPMA along side the PMI logo on the banners and presentation materials. Until now we all know that IPMA exists but it prefers to remain low profile with every major event focused on Project Management involving PMI.
Coming back to the event itself, it was surely an increase in overall quality. With the next event the target audience should be well selected among connoisseurs to make sure the public will rise to the level of high quality and specialized presentation.
But what was the most important lesson learned at the end of event is the general understanding of all speakers that Project Manager is a real profession and not a function any longer. The old times in traditional organizations in which one was pulled out from the crowd to play an accidental and temporary role of Project Manager are gone.
Today the Project Manager must be viewed as a stand-alone profession with key qualification and knowledge just like any other occupational job. If we have a globally accepted Standard for the Project Management, what if the PMI, IPMA, Australians and Japanese as well other entities would embrace the idea of a globally-recognized Project Manager profession - recognition among national occupational lists?
CODECS-OPEN UNIVERSITY along with PMI Romania Chapter and backed up by a group of sponsors hosted, as in every year at the beginning of November, the PM Forum Project Management day, an event addressed to those in or having relations with Project Management in Romania.
The SAS Radisson Hotel in Bucharest welcomed the invitees, over a hundred practitioners, members of training institutes and academia, and representatives from various industries on the morning of 4th of November 2008. With them, distinguished keynote speakers from across Europe and US took a seat at the conference center, some of them for the first time at the event while others turning into regular guests at PM events.
He also touched a very sensitive string of Code of Conduct when public monies are spent. Again, the presentation was more for those who could read between the lines to understand what was apparent but also for those familiar with more then simple Earned Value Methodology. This was the front displayed caption indeed, but Mr. Abba wanted to convey a subtler message for the audience and especially for those in touch with public funds: the obligation of disclosing the real facts and figures concerning the way the money is spent on governmental projects, ethics involved on each side, the contractors and the Government either if called DoD, DoE or other similar organisms in Europe or particularly in Romania. This is quite a hard issue to perceive even for those with some years in Project Management! That’s why with the next editions some invitees might get easily bored if not at the minimum acquaintance with the topics.
Jim de Piante parallelized the act of being a soccer coach for a kid’s team with the Project Management point of view on leadership skills. It was a vivid, humoristic yet serious speech that entertained the entire plenum audience for almost one hour, quite a time in tight schedule constraints. Behind the apparent frivolity of the topics one uninitiated could have thought it was, the cognizant in the Conference Hall easily recognized that some simple things in the life can prove themselves as sources of education and teaching. Again, Mr. De Piante’s presentation had had two facets: one for profanes who could have found the speech below the grade of event but with a lot of knowledge and symbols that professionals in project management could easily understand: the key words of Mr. De Piante’s moment was leadership and how this can work with project teams within the project management environment, applied for a team with specific skills.
The two giants on the software battlefield, Microsoft with its " Benefits of Microsoft EPM" presented by Mr. Claus Nielsen, and Primavera with a speech tailored on how its scheduling tool could put the PM at works and presented excellently by Mr. Giovanni di Folco from Techno Engineering & Associates, completed the first day of the Romanian PM Forum.
Other particular workshops on the first day included those in which Mr. Hans Aaaroe from Grontmij, a Danish based consulting company with present activities in the field of energy and consulting services, or Mr. Iustin Iavlev from ACTA Consulting &Audit who tackled the issue of deontology and ethics within EU financed projects. Mr. Chris Kindermanns the President of PMI Belgium, now a common figure in the Romanian PMI’s sessions, spoke to the audience about “ Competitiveness through Excellence,” while the Romanian PMI Chapter Mrs. Simona Bonghez advocated for the profession through her 20-minute, well-articulated, “ Selling Project Management” presentation.
Tracking back to the first PM Forum event, it is with no risk of mistake an abrupt upturn of the event’s overall quality from the first to the current 5th edition. More than that, the danger of not finding the minimum number of attendees with a minimum level of Project Management understanding concepts is really considerable for the next year event since with every year lapsed the topics and matters debated become more and more refined and highly inaccessible unless trained and educated properly in the field. Sophisticated mechanism of Earned Value methodology, scheduling techniques under any kind of software environment and by using CPM or PERT techniques, the Project Manager on the battlefield and how he/she could enlivens the project team by leadership skills are no longer for any audience.
With this last edition and from this point onward the public should become more refined when playing with concepts and notions. Even though a few of the same old figures were seen among the audience, along with them newcomers found their way to the event this year. Notwithstanding all the above, there is a bit of incompleteness while IPMA was not at all represented or present at this major event of the year. Not knowing exactly the affairs of the PM Forum sponsorship, it would have been great to have IPMA along side the PMI logo on the banners and presentation materials. Until now we all know that IPMA exists but it prefers to remain low profile with every major event focused on Project Management involving PMI.
Coming back to the event itself, it was surely an increase in overall quality. With the next event the target audience should be well selected among connoisseurs to make sure the public will rise to the level of high quality and specialized presentation.
But what was the most important lesson learned at the end of event is the general understanding of all speakers that Project Manager is a real profession and not a function any longer. The old times in traditional organizations in which one was pulled out from the crowd to play an accidental and temporary role of Project Manager are gone.
Today the Project Manager must be viewed as a stand-alone profession with key qualification and knowledge just like any other occupational job. If we have a globally accepted Standard for the Project Management, what if the PMI, IPMA, Australians and Japanese as well other entities would embrace the idea of a globally-recognized Project Manager profession - recognition among national occupational lists?
|
