It it's Monday, this must be Warsaw

Greetings from Poland! I still have a lot of updates to post from Denver, and a slew of great video, but between trying to catch up from being away, watching the Phillies restore my long lost belief in Philly sports teams and getting ready for Warsaw... I'm still working on catching up.

Right now I am in Warsaw at the 3rd International PMI Poland Congress. Things got off to a great start this morning and I am truly honored to be here. Rafal Mielczarek kicked things off this morning with an introduction that set the tone for what promises to be two days of great networking and learning. Just a few highlights... The Poland Chapter is something of a star in the PMI world, due to its very successful implementation of the Chapter with Branches model. They've done so well that the PMI Poland chapter has grown to 500 members since it received it's charter from PMI just five years ago, and this includes 25% growth just since the summer. Rafal joked, as the Dow goes down, their membership goes up.

In the first session, Alexandre Rodrigues, gave a presentation called Dynamic Risk Management. It covered all the basics of Risk Management and then launched into some very detailed explanations of the different tools, how they work, etc. In his talk, he urged the group to approach at Risk Management from a mindset that would allow them to see the opportunities as well as the negatives. He went on to recommend doing all they could to become aware of the opportunities and learning how to take advantage of them. My favorite line was when he said, "The project is not for the project, but for the business results." I think we (PMs) often lose sight of that when we are in the thick of things. He also explained to the participants why you can't manage risk my responding to deviation, but rather, you need to take action before the deviation occurs. 

I'll try to post something again this evening. I'm also going to be posting to the IT&T SIG Twitter Feed (http://twitter.com/pmiittelecom)

Right now I have to get back in there because I'm missing Alfonse Bucero's presentation on How to Upgrade a Weak Project Culture.

Before I go, I do want to say a special thanks to Kamila Siebierwska for all her help while I was preparing to come to Warsaw for the Congress. She’s been a great help!