Day 1 of PMI’s 2008 Asia Pacific Global Congress


Things got off to a great start Monday with a group of traditional Aborigine dancers entering the hall to the sounds of a didgeridoo, performing a dance to cleanse the energy in the hall for all the congress attendees. PMI President Greg Ballesteros gave an update on the phenomenal growth we are seeing in Project Management as it continues to enable companies all over the world improve their performance through the practice of our craft. PMI Chair Philip Diaz then welcomed the crowd and introduced Keynote Speaker Robyn Meredith. Ms. Meredith is an accomplished economic journalist who has written for a number of world-renowned publications including the New York Times and Forbes. She recently published a book that explores the rise to economic superpower status of China and India. As these two countries emerge, their evolution is having an unprecedented impact on the global economy. In her talk she compared and contrasted the two emerging giants and provided examples of how their drive to change their destiny is having a ripple effect that is undeniably impacting the entire world.



If you would like to learn more about Roby Meredith, or her book The Elephant and the Dragon, you can visit her website at http://elephantanddragon.com or pick it up via Amazon.com



After the keynote the sessions got underway. IT & T SIG Member and Troubled Project SIG Board Member, Alex Brown and Jennifer Tharp gave a talk on How to Become an Independent Consultant. Alex is a long-standing member of the IT & T SIG and his talks are always insightful and fun to watch.



With the first sessions complete the exhibition floor opened. Past Chair, Mark Lurch, Asia Pacific Regional Director, SK Khor and I all manned the booth and greeted the Congress Attendees. There was a great turnout and if you are attending Congress and haven’t stopped by booth 19 yet, please do so. Will be filming for our video podcast today and tomorrow and we’d love to talk to you.



Before the day ended we were very fortunate to get to spend some time with the Keynote Speaker, Robyn Meredith. She sat down with us for a video podcast, which should be posted within the next day or so, so please keep checking back for more details.

PMI Asia Pac Leadership – Sydney, Australia (Day 2)


Day 2 started out with sessions for leaders of the components including a 3-part presentation on the framework being introduced for the Chapters. While the current version does not apply to SIGs and Colleges, it provided a good primer for some of the types of tools and metrics we will be expected to use to measure our maturity, organizational strengths and ability to add value.


One of the best sessions of the morning was a presentation by PMI Asia Pacific Service Center Manager, David Goh and Tarnbir Kaur on Cultural Diversity. The talk was based on research done by the two presenters and it offered details on the different dimensions used to assess cultural differences and the way they communicate. While the talk centered around Asian and Indian cultures, it offered those from outside those regions a wonderful opportunity to present specific issues/concerns in working with different cultures in order to get valuable feedback on how to be more effective in working with them. Being able to share issues with colleagues from across the globe and see how they approach different leadership situations is what the Leadership sessions are all about.


The PMI Board members were present at lunch on the second day and everyone attending had an opportunity to visit with them about everything from changes in our profession to the state of PMI. One interesting point of note was the topic of Skype, and how many of us are now using it as the preferred method of keeping in touch with the folks back home.


After lunch sessions included a working session on the PMI Code of Ethics and the types of issues we, as component leaders, face in dealing with our members and volunteers.


The day rounded out with an update on the Community Transformation Project and finally the Leader 2 Leader session in which attendees have the opportunity to address the Board of PMI directly with questions about things specific to running chapters, SIGs and Colleges.


Leadership ended with a reception in the Sydney Tower Sky Lounge, the second tallest building in the southern hemisphere. The Sydney Tower is the same height as the Eiffel Tower in Paris and it offered a great way to get a panoramic view of Sydney and the surrounding countryside.


Monday will bring the start of Global Congress and a keynote presentation by Robyn Meredith on her book The Elephant and the Dragon. If you are attending Global Congress, stop by the IT & Telecommunications SIG Booth (#19) and say Hi. If you are up for it, we’ll videotape you for our video podcast, which will be posted at the end of the day.

PMI Asia Pac Leadership - Sydney, Australia 2008

We’re one day into PMI’s 2008 Asia Pacific Leadership Meeting and things are off to a great start. The meeting kicked off with an amazingly heartfelt talk given by Peter Bains talk called Leadership Matters. Bains works for the Sydney Police as a forensic specialist dealing in large-scale disasters and terrorist attacks. The talk centered on Bain’s involvement in the response to the Boxing Day Tsunami that hit Thailand in 2004. The talk was very moving and most of the audience was on the brink of tears as Bains described the challenges he and his team faced in doing DVI (Disaster Victim Identification) in the weeks after the attack. From a leadership standpoint, there were two things Bains brought up that were particularly poignant. The first was that he divided anyone’s involvement in a project into four stages. The first is the frenetic, adrenaline stage when people are highly motivated, just trying to figure out what is going on. They don’t need much to keep them going then because they have a lot of enthusiasm. The second stage has them move into a business as usual mindset. They’ve learned how things work, they aren’t the new guy anymore and they know their job. The third stage is where Bain’s focused. In the third stage, the energy level drops. The motivation is gone, routine has set in and there is a breakdown of enthusiasm. This, Bain’s argued, is where leadership is most critical. You need to keep people energized, focused and make sure, above all, that they have a clarity of purpose that is completely ingrained in their minds and hearts. This needs to continue through the fourth stage, exit, when everyone is just looking for a way out. Bains contended that real leadership is able to keep a team motivated beyond the sexy part, all the way through the day-to-day drudgery until you cross the finish line. He challenged all of us to make sure we had clarity of purpose that truly identified why we do what we do.

As they day moved on, the topics covered included an update on the state of al things IT at PMI, the status of things in the AP region itself and finally breakout sessions for the components. Things were run a bit differently than in meetings past and the exercises that the SIG’s and non AP Chapters went through allowed us a great opportunity to share information on topics like member retention, volunteer sourcing, finding new leaders for your organization, etc. It was a bit less volatile than what usually takes place back in the states, but it was very valuable.

After the day’s events there was a small networking reception and then most folks headed over to watch the Mardi Gras parade. Sydney’s annual Gay Pride Mardi Gras Parade is second in size and scope only to its New Year’s Eve celebration. The streets and parks were packed to the gills with folks either celebrating their lifestyle or just taking it all in. Sydney is known as one of the most accepting cities on the planet for those who live a gay/lesbian lifestyle and regardless of where you stand on the issue, it is a very amazing site and quite characteristic of the welcoming, laid back style of the Sydneysiders.
Today is day 2 of Leadership - more to follow.
Just one last interesting fact...

The hopping marsupial with a pouch that we all know and love as the kangaroo was named when the first English settlers in Australia asked the aborigines what that the name of the hopping animal was. The aborigines, not speaking English, kept responding with the phrase, which phonetically spells kangaroo. It actually means, “What do you mean?”

May the podcast be with you...

IT & Telecommunications SIG Podcast - The Art of War and Project Management, Episode 1

.......

The four things I miss about Texas
1. The Rangers
2. Gloria's
3. Dunn Brothers
4. Madness Comics and Games

......

Three days away from a trip to Sydney - nervous about surviving the long flight. Especially rife with terror about getting stranded on an island with John Locke on my way back.

Did Roger Blink?

There is a fascinating article posted in ESPN that breaks down the body language of Roger Clemens during his testimony this week. Regardless of whether you are a fan of baseball, or are even following the fallout from the Mitchell Report, It is a fascinating article that should be of special interest to anyone who has read Blink or Emotional Intelligence.

I'm a big fan of PMs studying body language. It is a critical tool in understanding how to read your team members and clients. Most of all, when you learn to be able to control and manipulate your own body language, it allows you to use it as an additional tool of persuasion (cough cough, Art of War, cough cough).

I'm working on a podcast that will focus on the Art of War and Project Management. It should be ready be the end of the weekend and a link will be posted here.

GTD and Project Management, two great taste that... um... maybe

For about a year now I've been trying to find different ways to blend the old timey PMBOK approach with some of the tools of agile. I'm doing this because after years of suffering the after effects of a "bad experience" with extreme programming, I ended up on a gig at a company for whom the waterfall/pmbok approach was entirely useless. Their business was so wide in scope and in such a constant state of flux that an agile approach was actually the only viable option.

Cue the Scrum intro music...

And as I've mentioned in previous posts, this resulted in something of a shift in my job responsibilities. Which leads to my new project-ish idea.

The new thing I've started working on is how to incorporate GTD into my project management. I have been trying to use it to try to maintain the tidal wave of stuff I have to keep track of each day, but lately I've been wondering how those same principals could be applied to a larger venue - beyond personal productivity to actual project and program management.

I'll post updates as I work through this, but if anyone has comments or suggestions, they'd be most welcome.

I'm working on a project right now with a Developer who has taken on the role of Scrum Master. Because he's the primary contact on the client site, he has unwittingly become the recipient of all the stress that normally falls to the PM. While he has been in the Tech Lead role before, and had to deal with the issues that normally accompany herding developers, he is now also dealing with more "administrative" issues like staffing challenges, basic attendance, billing, and general client management stress and concerns.

The more I watch, the more I see him accidentally evolving into the mindset of a PM. It is at times humorous and painful. At the end of this project, like it or not, his brain will have been re-wired to think like a PM.

I love being a PM because I am good at it, but I do sometimes wonder, if I could go back to that moment when I found the copy of Microsoft Project 3 in the closet at Nick Online and stop myself from starting down this path that would lead to the stress and angst that have become the oxygen of my professional life, would I not feel compelled to forcibly remove myself from that closet before the damage was done?

THE ANTI CORRUPTION LAYER MANAGER PERSON...

Right now I'm working on a project where Ray Lewallen,  and I have introduced Scrum to an organization that has been using waterfall as their methodology of choice for some time. The idea was that between his development background, and my PM background, we'd be able to introduce it in a very cohesive way. Ray is the Scrum Master and I'm something other than the Scrum Master. 

Last week we gave a talk at Innotech in Oklahoma City called "Implementing Scrum From the Perspectives of an Agilist and a Control Freak" where we discussed  some of the issues we have been experiencing. I'll be posting more on some of those issues in the coming weeks. During the talk I explained what my role on the project has turned into, which is basically to position myself "between" the project sponsor and product owner. My job is to take the output of the Scrum meetings and turn it into something useful and palatable for the product owner and the civilians he has to update each week on the project.

After some slightly heated discussion with the developers (who, just for the record, do not like to be called sheep), a brand new title was bestowed upon me. I am no longer Project Manager, Program Manager or that GO4%^&*# BAS%^&#$* with a Checklist!

BOW DOWN BEFORE ME... FOR I AM.

THE ANTI CORRUPTION LAYER

(Obviously I'll need to be setting to work on the cape and utility belt)

Gearing up for the PMI Leadership and Congress in Atlanta. It should be very cool - or it should be whatever passes for cool at a PM Convention.

I'm going to try out a video blog - will post a link here.

On a side note, sometimes I find myself saying things that, as the words leave my mouth, completely baffle me. My best used to be "Katie, do not run with scissors in your mouth!"

Until today when I got to say "I'm pretty sure that referring to the client as the antichrist, is not really a best practice."

The Dunken PM’s Rules of Project Management

1.You are not nearly as smart, or experienced as you think you are.

2.The client is not as obtuse as you think they are.

3.Your ego is in your way.

4.Provide your client with what they need in a manner that requires as little of them as possible.

5.There are multiple ways to solve every problem. What you have done in the past may be more familiar, and you may have spent more time on it, but it is not necessarily the best answer for this specific situation. Always be willing to consider other solutions.

6.When you encounter conflict. Take the time first to imagine you are arguing your opponents side. Understand their argument and find the holes and issues in yours before you speak.

7.What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. Keep you eyes open for new solutions and be ready and willing to adapt.

8.You can, and should, learn from everything.

9.Your primarily responsibility is to the project. It is more important that the client’s ego and your ego.

10. Your secondary responsibility is to the client. This means making sure they have what they need, know what they need to know and receive all of it in the most easily digestible format possible.

11. Be respectful of everyone.

12. If they have asked you for hamburger, that doesn’t always mean that you should give them filet mignon. Sometimes, they really just want a really good hamburger.

13. Find the things you resist and understand why. These things are limiting your ability to grow and adapt.

14. Find the things you do not do and the things you avoid. Learn why and then break the avoidance habit.

15. At the end of each day, think of three things you did right, and three things you did should have done better. For the latter, plan out what you will do next time to realize a better result.