P2P 2009, Cairo Egypt
P2P 2009 kicked off today with opening presentations by a number of keynote speakers including Brisk Consulting CEO and event organizer, Emad Aziz, Dr. Gamal Nassar, Chairman of PMI MENA Chapter; Philip Diab, the immediate past Chair of PMI; current PMI Chair, Ricardo Viana Vargas and former Managing Director of the Scrum Alliance, Jim Cundiff. This year P2P is significantly larger than last year. It is being held under the auspices of H.E. Dr. Ahmed Darwish, Minister of State for Administrative Development and H.E. Dr. Hatem El Gabaly, Minister of Health and includes tracks on Technology, Agile and Scrum, Construction, and Oil and Gas.

"Egypt is wonders of the past and investment in the future"

During the opening presentation by Dr. Darwish this morning he talked about the growth of project management in Egypt and the need to develop talent internally so that as Egypt completes the current five year plan in 2012 and moves into the five year plan that will end in 2017, there are PMs who are trained in their craft and experienced and skilled enough to get the work done. PMI Chair, Ricardo Vargas spoke about PMI's commitment to developing PM best practices and awareness in the African region and talked about the work the Project Management Institute Educational Foundation (PMIEF) is doing to promote Project Management training for high-schools. In a presentation on the work of PMIEF, PMI Immediate Past Chair Philip Diab, gave an expanded view into all the great work they are doing to develop scholarships and expanded educational offerings for the underprivileged as well as emerging markets.

After the coffee break, incoming PMI Board Member, Frank Parth, gave a presentation of PMI Standards, how they are defined and developed. Frank was the project manager on PMI's Standard for Program Management, 2nd Edition.

We're only part of the way through Day 1, and I have to get back to the hall to attend the rest of the day's sessions. Over then next three days, sessions will be held by several IT&T SIG Board Members including, IT&T SIG Chair, Petra Goltz; VP of Strategic Marketing, Bob Tarne; VP Professional Development, Marisa Oldnall; VP Operations (and incoming Vice Chair), Andy Maxymillian as well as myself. PMI Agile Community of Practice founder Jesse Fewell will be giving a number of presentations over the next few days as will Jim Cundiff.

If you'd like to follow the events, we are using the hash tag #p2pconf in Twitter.

More to follow

Premature Tweetage

An interesting story on the Social Engineering Through (un)intentional Manipuation of Social Media front...

An article on Obama calling Kanye West a "jackass" for being, well, a "jackass" at the MTV awards showed up online this morning. Apparently it was an off the record comment that was made, and then tweeted by ABC's Terry Moran. Here is the article about it:

http://www.politico.com/click/stories/0909/did_obama_call_kanye_a_jackass.html

ABC news then issues an apology for premature tweeting of an off the record story. The tweet is no longer on Terry Moran's twitter page http://twitter.com/TerryMoran

Now I'm wondering how long it will be before people start "accidentally tweeting" stuff that they delete and apologize for as soon as the meme has leaked and begun to work its' viral damage.

Social Media and Personal Branding - Episode 1

Interview with Brian Flatow, President of The AdStore

I’ve posted the first of three podcasts in a series on Personal Branding and Social Media. This one is an interview with Brian Flatow, President of the Ad Store. I’ve known Brian a long time and it was great to get the opportunity to get to sit down and hear his thoughts on how to use Twitter, the other social media tools and how it can help/hurt personal brand.
You can find the video on the IT&T SIG website -> http://www.pmi-ittelecom.org/

Hamsketball - The Sport of Kings
(We need your help!)

It is a simple idea, very basic, and someday, with any luck, it will be huge. If baseball was bourne on the back of cricket, this will be the successor of basketball. This is Hamsketball.

At it’s core, Hamsketball is just like basketball, except instead of the round ball that has bounced across so many playgrounds and gym floors, in this one, the rock is made of ham.

I know what you’re thinking, it can’t bounce, and… it’s made of compressed ham, it will never work, yadda, yadda, yadda. People always underestimate the pig. After all, it is the swiss army knife of meat. Bacon, ham, scrapple, pigs feat, pigs ears, and all the glorious cuts of pork… nothing brings value to the table like the pig. And now, it’s not just for breakfast anymore.

Of course, the road to greatness is always rocky. Today my daughter and I took a great leap towards the future national pastime. In a deli on John St. in NYC, we decided to find out just how much it would cost to make a hamsketball. Apparently, a lot more than we can afford. We’re figuring that in order to get one good hamsketball, we’ll need an entire thing (we don’t know what the giant shrink wrapped thing of compressed deli ham is called) costs about $125. Clearly, those folks at Boar’s Head saw this coming. At $125 a pop, figuring at least 2-3 balls per game, Hamsketball might as well be ham polo.

If anyone out there has connections to the folks making those giant allotments of pig finery, if you could put a word in, the world will be in your debt as we move one step closer to the new one, true sport. Hamsketball – the sport of kings!

The Shrunken drunkenPM and the Portuguese Sessions

Last week I had the great honor of being video interviewed by my favorite shrink, Bas de Baar on ProjectShrink.com. This time, the topic was Personal Branding. The video went up today.

http://blog.softwareprojects.org/personal-branding-for-project-managers-1880.html

I'm also very happy to report that I put up some new video interviews from the Portugal Chapter Congress this past Spring. I've posted interviews with Alexandre Rodrigues, President of PMI Portugal, Gabriela Fernandes, who also serves on the PMI Portugal Board and was the organizer of the event, and Theofanis Giotis, the President of PMI Greece.

You can find the videos on the PMI IT&T SIG site.

Video Podcast Update

Posted a new IT&T SIG video podcast – one of the best yet. This is an interview that was shot in Amsterdam at the PMI Congress with Björn Granvik from Jayway. The Swedes in PMI are, as a rule, pretty awesome folk and sharp as hell. In the interview we talk about Jayway, Øredev (one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to because of the diversity present) and Scrum. The twist on Scrum in this podcast is that Björn tells the story of how he started using Scrum in his marriage, making his wife the Product Owner. Pretty soon, the kids took to it as well and began assigning themselves tasks so that their Dad would get to the stuff they wanted to do. It’s a great story. You can access the video on the IT&T SIG website which also has a link to iTunes where you can subscribe to the podcast if you like. I’ve still got a lot from Amsterdam, Portugal and some of the branding and social media stuff I’ve been working on, so I’m trying to put up one a week.

Link to Gantthead article on branding your projects

This link is to a Gantthead article that was written by Andy Jordan. It makes a case for the importance of branding your projects: http://www.gantthead.com/article.cfm?ID=250504

Bridging the Gap to Agile: Scrum Status Reporting in a Waterfall Organization

Here is a link to the whitepaper I wrote while I was at EMC, "Bridging the Gap to Agile: Scrum Status Reporting in a Waterfall Organization".

Personal Branding for Project Managers

Almost out of the woods…

I’ve been quiet, well, not quiet. I’ve been (re)learning some lessons about over commitment. Not out of the woods yet, but close enough that I can hear the cars out there on the highway waiting to run me down when I break through the trees.

The research on PM Mashups has proven to be really interesting. Maybe it is an indicator that the meme hasn’t fully reached the PM world yet, maybe people in this profession need to waste more hours surfing You Tube or watching Towers Under Fire (which makes so much more sense to me now that it did when I rented it from TLA back in college.) In general though, what I’ve found is that there are folks who do mashup techniques and tools from outside PM, but they don’t think of it as a mashup. There are others who have completely different ideas about what a PM Mashup would be.

Either way, the paper for PMI Congress is done and I’m really looking forward to giving the presentation and, more importantly, hearing what the folks who attend have to share about how they are mashing it up.

The best part about the research for this paper was that it led me back to an idea that had been stuck in my head since the Scrum Gathering in Orlando. The idea of Personal Branding and how people in PM or IT use it (or not) and what impact it can have on their world. I got kinda deep into it and was sidetracked from the mashup idea for a few weeks. (Nothing like creating a new project when you already have stuff spilling off the plate.) But now, I’m back at it and this is my new topic. I’m going to put together an article on it, I’ll be posting here in the blog and I’ve already got a few video interviews to post.

What I’ve found so far though is that personal brand is an idea that PMs in general should probably spend a lot more time thinking about it than they do. I still believe that trust and transparency are the currency of PM, but personal branding seems to be that missing piece that can be used to tie some of the other pieces that lay out there, impacting us, but we don’t think about, or just generally aren’t aware of.

I have a few hours of video to edit still from Poland and Amsterdam – I’m going to have it all posted within the next few days. Once it is up, the Personal Branding of Project Managers will be the main focus of this blog.

So, if you are reading this, and you are working in IT or PM, and you actually spend time thinking about and working on Personal Branding, please let me know. I’m hoping to spend awhile on this topic.