PMI Portugal Chapter Event
5 June, 2009 - 6 June 2009, Lisbon, Portugal

Right now they are finishing up the last presentation of Day 1 of the PMI Portugal Chapter Event. The event is very well attended, with over 50% of the members of the chapter present. The presentations today started out in English and switched to Portuguese just before lunch. After the opening session this morning which was led by Prof. Alexandre Rodrigues, PMP, who is the President of the PMI Portugal Chapter and the Conference Chair, along with Gabriela Fernandes, PMP, Director of the PMI Portugal Chapter and the Conference Project Manager and Dr. Jose Pinto, PMP, Director of the PMI Portugal Chapter and the Conference Director. (For those of you keeping score at home, Dr. Pinto also serves as the EMEA Regional Director for the IT&T SIG. The IT&T SIG recently posted interviews that Jose shot with PMI Chair Ricardo Vargas from the PMI EMEA Congress in Amsterdam. The interviews were done in both English and Portuguese. - watch them here and here.)

After the kickoff, Rachel Hammer, the EMEA Component Relations Liaison from the PMI EMEA Service Center gave a presentation on PMI in the EMEA Region and I followed up with a presentation that centered around the idea that if our profession is going to continue to grow and evolve, we (the PMs) are the ones who need to start having at developing new tools and paradigms in order to get us into a new stage of maturity for our profession.

After that, they transitioned over to Portuguese. Sadly,my ability to understand Portuguese is about on par with my ability to understand the game of cricket. However, what was related to me about the presentation that was given by Eng. Julio Moreno from HP Portugal made me quite jealous of the others in the room who are not as language challenged as I.

Since I missed out on the Portuguese sessions I'm going to try and shoot some video this evening on impressions from the first day and I'll try to post them as quickly as possible. (Tonight if I can find a power convertor for my mac because I foolishly left all my adapters at home.)

For the Agile minded, I mentioned it a few times in my presentation and a number of people came up to talk about it further after the session. Which gave me a great opportunity to promote the new Scrum Master for PMPs class that is being developed by the Scrum Alliance, and which I will be writing on in great length later this weekend.

One person in particular had questions about using Lean with, or alongside a traditional PMBOK based approach, if anyone who reads this can comment on that, it would be greatly appreciated.

I will be tweeting from the event tomorrow under @pmiittelecom and both PMI Chair Ricardo Vargas (@rvvargas) and I will be using the hash tag #PMIPC

More later...