It has been now 7 seven days since I returned from this Years PM Forum 2010 hosted and organized by the GPM (Gesellschaft fuer Projekt Management).

There have been some views shared on the internet already:

• Andreas Heilwagen shared his view and gives advice how to prepare for a conference (I liked his red hat)
• Susanne Bartel shared her view on the conference and reflecting on my presentation (Thanks Susanne)

Looking back its has been a great experience where not much can be enhanced. So here is my view

1) Great Keynotes

Just to give you a view examples

• Matthias Horx - Trend und Zukunftsforscher
  Key message: There is a better future after a crisis
• Volker Doekel - Project Manager for the A380 Project at Lufthansa
  Key message: More communication, less tools
• Friedrich Fuehr - Founder of the DESERTEC Foundation
  Key Message: Have a vision and be the change you want to see
• Tom De Marco (definitely another highlight) - author of “Der Termin” - “The Deadline”
  Key Message: Systems became to complex to handle
• Christian Gansch - Vom Solo zur Sinfonie
  Key message: Everybody plays an important part in a project

Just these keynotes have been worth coming to this event

2) Good exibition

Many companies have participated and have been exposed to around 900 visitors.

Definitely a great side activity and creating a creative environment for all the participants.

The food was served close to the exibition and therefore may people hang around there.

3) The speaches and presentations

It’s like with every conference. There are very good speakers, there are good speakers and there are average speakers. At this years PM Forum 2010 there was a good balance. If you were lucky picking the right presentation you could have seen quite some good presentations.

The ones I was impressed by, were the following:

• Wolfram Mueller - Great speech about his well known approach about Critical Chain Projekt Management. Based on a buffer he is adding to the project he is able to manage the portfolio and resources effectively.
• Thomas Roellecke - Talking about opportunities, threats and risks in international projects with international teams. The slides also worked like an abstract. So if you want to read through the 18 items addressed, check out the slides on the PM Forum page (as a participant your able to download them)
• Dr. Lorenz Schneider - Great presentation about the challenges by being responsible building the Shanghai Formula 1 Circuit. Freat pictures, and damm, this guy got experience. Make sure you read his abstract in the conference book.
• Tabita Armbrecht and Monika Ulmer - they gave a great insight in Project Management career development at a large health insurance company in Germany. Great stuff to develop the talent from the inside.

4) Overall

Great event, definitely worthwhile attending

The only thing from my side that was missing.

Please record the presentations and publish them as video podcasts on itunes and on your website. Would have been a great value add. (Spend less money on food and more on recording and documenting.

Next year I will be there.

One day in Berlin just to visit the Entrepreneurship Summit 2010.

A special event which took place in 2009 already, as an initiative by the Stfitung Entrepreneurship. The Key member of that foundation is Prof. Dr. Faltin, the author of the book “Kopf schlaegt Kapital“. One of the bestellers at amazon for the last years. He is fostering the idea to work on a business model which is designed by using components that you as the entrepreneur do not have to build but put them together in a way that they work from start to finish. Almost none of the activites relevant to deliver a product to the customer is being performed by you or your company but suppliers delivering specific parts of the supply chain. The benefit of that method is, that you as the founder are focusing on the horizon and the market to be able to adapt your business accordingly. A very interesting approach that has been proven by many entrepreneurs already. The examples often used are Teekampagne (delivering a world-class tee, darjeeling, to customers in bigger packages) and Ratiodrink (delivering juice concentrate to customers in bigger packages) and eBuero (delivering secretary and buero services to companies that are to small to engage them on their own).

After reading his book I was fascinated about that idea, I would have paid 1.000 Euros to attend a workshop just on that topic. How ever, looking at his website I saw the invite for this years summit for 35 Euros for early birds. So I caught the worm and with a friend of mine we travelled to Berlin to the Freie Universitaet with about 1.000 others and got inspired.

Some key presentations have been held. The best one probably from Alex Osterwald, the author of the Book “Business Model Generation”, not another generation beside ‘Generation Y’ but a way to create and change business modells. A fantastic presentation (presentation zen style) and 100 slides he had to squeeze into 20 minutes. Well done Alex. and a great way to explain your way of thinking. Thanks.

The biggest surprise to me was ‘Nena’, speaking about her private school she founded with her husband and two more friends about 3 years ago.

To summarize: Great event, great crowds, creative environment and great impulses by the presentations and workshops. Go for it, and spread the word. And if just 10 ideas make it successful to the market it was worthwhile (out of 100 ideas, 99 fail = 1.000 participants = 10 ideas that will be successful).

During the summit i recorded some pictures and video and during my idle time on the train I created a Video with iMovie on my iPhone4. Its impressive what can be done on a phone within 30 to 60 minutes. Unbelievable. So check it out.

It has been quite a while that i was presenting at a conference. February 2009 at the PMI Congress in Kuala Lumpur. Now this years first presentation is about a chapter in my new book ‘Kompendium fuer ITIL V3 Projekte‘ released as the 2nd edition in January 2010.
Within this book we are talking about a model that we have identified and developed to visualise complexity, put the complexity into context and be able to adapt measures that help you in your day to day life as a project manager.
How ever, I will talk about this Model in a future Blog Post. At this point in time I would like to refer to the video taken and the slides presented. Please see below and feel free to comment on the model and the approach itself.
To do that you need to be capable in understanding German as a language.

And here are the slides:

Currently I am preparing a presentation for this years interPM conference in Glashuetten (small little town close to Frankfurt). The topic is something about Risk / Complexity and how to identify, measure, manage and communicate it.

How ever, as I perceive, Germany is still a little behind using real time social media as part of their events like conferences. You do not see many people in the audience with a Laptop, iPhone or other devices to real time blog or tweet (using twitter) about the presentation or event. There are some geeks out there doing this. Thomas Witt (@thomas_witt, blog at www.thomas-witt.com) is one of them as he recently tweeted from the TEDx event in Berlin (#TEDxBerlin).

So I am thinking of making twitter in integral part of my presentation and my slides. What I am thinking of is using that kind of approach and functionality for …

• Receive feedback from the audience based on a predefined hashtag
• Real time voting and polls
• Auto Twitter the slide and notes you are currently presenting on

All this of course is dependent on three things …

• Public WiFi or LAN in the room and Laptop connected to it
• Critical Number of people in the room with a mobile device like Laptop, iPhone, RIM and others
• and of course the Plug-ins for Powerpoint

I can’t really influence the first two. Hope is my only method :-) How ever, the last bullet I am able to influence and therefore I was looking for tools and plug-ins to be able to make that functionality part of my presentation. So I stumbled upon the plug-ins from Timo Elliot, an evangelist for SAP. He has developed some pretty neat tools and Shockwave Plug-Ins for Powerpoint that allow you to exactly to do what I was looking for.

1) Receive feedback from the audience based on a predefined hashtag

The plug-in provides the capability to provide real time tweets based on hash tags (#) and usernames (@), you can configure the format (bubbles or boxes), the refresh rate in seconds, special custom feeds (great for search terms outside the average hash tag approach and you can manual refresh the page.

So if you introduce a specific hash tag at the beginning of your presentation (eg. #TKOinterPM, make sure you make it shorter than I just did) and let people tweet during your presentation you can show the audience what the audience has tweeted about your presentation.

That’s how the page could look like (used the #pmot hashtag for ‘Project Managers on Twitter’)

2) Real time voting and polls

You can ask specific questions and have people vote for one or the other answer. If you really want to have your ass kicked ask how the audience liked your presentation. It could go from ‘lame’ via ‘average’ to ‘autostanding’ or whatever you choose. Here is how it works:

Choose a hashtag for the voting like #voteTJKinterPM and than ask the audience to put a number up in front their tweet representing the vote. Like ‘1 i really like your presentation #voteTJKinterPM’ or ‘1 #voteTJKinterPM’. Wait a couple of seconds depending on the internet speed and show up the slides with the results.

Here is how the result could look like:

3) Auto Twitter the slide and notes you are currently presenting on

If you want to tweet life updates of your presentation, you just need to put <twitter> and </twitter> in your notes page before and after the text you want to be tweeted on twitter. This should be either a small summary of your page or the key facts. You can configure that functionality by connecting to your twitter account and provide the hash tag you want to be connected with your tweets. That allows you to use different hash tags for different presentations with the same slides.

Here is how the configuration screen looks like:

Summary

What a fantastic way to interact with your audience and use the real time social media functionality that changed our world of communication and interaction with others in the recent past. What i explained in this post is one way how YOU could enhance this ‘Game Changer’ to enhance your way of communicating with your audience. Go ahead and try.

Downloads and further information (Thanks to Timo Elliot):

• More detailed Instructions you can find here.
• The Powerpoint Plug-in can be downloaded here.

What do you think? How will these options enhance your way of communication and interaction with your audience? Please comment !

After almost two weeks I have returned from Kuala Lumpur attending and presenting at the PMI Global Congress for Aisa Pacific. What a great experience.

Thanks to the PMI Team putting this great Congress together. Thanks to SK for taking us on a tour, thanks to Tim for the great accompany, thanks for Robert for the great feedback on my first run of the Risk Management Workshop and thanks to everybody attending my two sessions. It has been a pleasure presenting in fron of you, it has been a pleasure to see your participation and it has been a pleasure to share so much expertise during the hours we spent together. Also thanks to everybody for their keenness to receive the slides and the templates.

First of all the slides. You can click through them right here or download them from the slideshare.net website. The templates will be emailed to the ones that have dropped me their business card. Feel free to comment in this post I like to hear your comments about this Congress.

February will be coming soon and the next PMI Global Congress Asia Pacific has opened registration. Lots of speakers have been locked in for the 2 1/2 days from the 09th to the 11th of February 2009.

Check out the Congress website for further details and or the program. The Congress will be held in Kuala Lumpur which is just 7 hours and around 1.000 AUD away from Brisbane and Australia (If you live in Darwin you might save a couple of hours. But do not know whether there is a direct flight to KL).

The Congress is followed by the PMI Seminars World. 8 great 2 day seminars will be held on Thursday and Friday the 12th and 13th of February, which is a great opportunity to obtain PDUs and to increase your skills.

Make sure you register as the early bird registration will close by the 23rd of Jan 2009.

By the way, I will also be there and facilitating a double session on Risk Management. The Title is “How to Identify, Measure and Manage Risk Throughout the Life Cycle of the Project”. Ok, the title is a little bit general. How ever, I will be taking about the following items at least

• Effective Health Checks to proactive mitigate project risk
• Effective Processes to manage Risk throughout your project
• How to facilitate a Risk Assessment in the early stages of a project
• How to present risk profiles to specific stakeholders and audiences

If you have some more ideas, please let me know.

Even if you haven’t had the chance to attend PMAsia in Singapore earlier this year, the papers are available for download. There are some interesting topics to look at:

• Managing Projects with Overseas Consultants
• Risk Management in Complex Situations
• PRINCE2, Less than Meets the Eye - But Less Can Be More
• Understanding Programs and Projects - Oh, there’s a difference

Have a go and a pick.

PMOZ 2009 is calling papers. PMOZ is a well established Project Management conference within Australia that will get together again in 2009 in the Australian Capital Canberra from the 10th to the 12th of of August 2009 in the National Conference Centre.

I have attended the PMOZ 2007 at the Gold Coast and and PMOZ 2008 in Melbourne and have always taken away something. I have met great people working in the same profession, learned about new trends, step deeper into existing skills and I also had a great time during the breakouts. Presenting was also a very good option to get yourself out of the comfort zone and to expose yourself to others that are interested in your topic. A great and easy way in getting known to new people as they most likely will approach you after a speech.

What we can see from the website that PMOZ got a new CI (Corporate Identity) that is now in sync with PM Global.

So the call for papers is on. Make sure you secure your spot as slots are running out quickly.

Please download the brochure here and understand what to do to be accepted.

Cornelius Fichter, The Host of the PMpodcast, is chairing the 2008 PMO Summit in Coconut Grove Florida.
As the chair he was asked to open the summit with a short keynote (Good on you, Cornelius), and he decided on the theme “The Value of PMOs”. To get an understanding about the perception out there he asked his audience to participate in a survey and to complete 5 questions.

Here is the survey and my answers.

1) Where do you think that PMOs provide the most value?
In Portfolio mgmt, Project tracking & status reporting, General PM support & training, Improved resource mgmt, Improved scope mgmt, Knowledge leverage & re usage, Projects finish on time, Reduced delivery cost, Proactive issue & risk mgmt, Company wide PM standardisation

For me its the following:
Provides Most Value - in General PM support & training
Provides Second Most Value - in for Project tracking & status reporting
Provides Third Most Value - in for Company wide PM standardisation

2) Is the value of your PMO understood by senior management?
There was the answer options “yes”, “no”, “the Company does not have a PMO”, “Other”
Everybody needs to answer that based on her / his specific situation.

3) What do you see as the latest PMO trends? (For instance a specific type of software, a management concept or PMO certification. I’d like to learn what you see at the horizon for us.)
My Answer: The trend we have seen in the past is from centralisation to decentralisation. I f a PMO is becoming to big (number of resources), strong facilitator of a specific method and stage gates etc. and is being perceived as a bottle neck for companies innovation, flexibility and time to market it will be decentralised. After some time, new PMOs show up in the company, different shapes of specific project methods get developed and worst case different Tools to support the method. The key question is, whether a PMO is an admin function (resource Facilitation & Training, Project Method & Tools provisioning) or whether it has the operational responsibility to deliver a project (profit & loss) because than governance including health checks, status reporting, Quality Management procedures and a flexible standardised approach plays a much bigger role.

4) What makes a PMO successful in it’s day to day operations?
My Answer: Effective support in benefit realisation to the business by supporting the well skilled selected PMs to apply a flexible method, supported by an easy to use Tool. Its not about strict rules and guidelines. Its about flexible application of these to be able to realise business benefits in time to market.

5) Do you have any further comments in regards to PMOs or this quick survey?
My Answer: Enjoy your keynote and the conference. Looking forward to a podcast on that experience and the lessons learnt from that conference including some new trends in that space.

It will be interesting what Cornelius is coming back with.
What are the new trends? I havent seen many new things in that space. Prince 2 is getting stronger here in Australia and PMI/PMBOK have to suffer a little bit from the Governance call to support Prince2 (The Government see it as the silver bullet

Another question would be, what happens to PMOs and PM in the current market climate (Recession or here in Australia the D-Word which means deficit)?
Are project methods been reassessed and made smaller and more effective?
Does the project register (that any PMO should have) becomes great value for transparency, re-prioritisation and re-assessment of particular projects?
Are PMs layed off?
Are PMOs decentralised and the PMs moved back into the business?

What is happening out there (Remember, we are on an island here, a BIG island, but still an island) !

Cornelius, we are looking for the answers!

Wow, just came across this one. There is a PMI Chapter in Canada, Calgary, (Souther Alberta Chapter) that has just organized a Conference with more than 500 project managers to attend. Everybody who has ever organized an event or a conference does know how much efforts gos into it. Venue, Speakers, Registration, the whole caring about delegates, accommodation, sponsorships, guidelines, speakers and their papers, website, content, etc etc etc.

So these guys now managed to organize the whole conference called PMI SAC Conference. Even if the program looks great by covering all areas of leadership, coaching, influencing, self-promotion and how to create winning projects. A two day conference for less than a 1.000 Dollars.

Program packed with good stuff and great presentation on the website with all the details.

Neil Sanderson, President of the Local Chapter is reffering to the demand on well trained project managers.

There is no lack of work all over the world for professional project managers. There is always a huge demand for professionally trained project managers, and, in these uncertain economic times, the demand is even greater.

I heard these things for the last 3 month a couple of times. When the going gets rough the tough gets going. Meaning that if there is a downturn in economy, projects are getting cut and therefore he demand is slowing down the demand for training is getting higher. As the Project Manager has the time to train as well as needs to catch up with certifications and special skills and has to get ahead of the ‘competition’.

Richard Egelstaff referred to that in his presentation at the PMI Queensland Chapter in September this year and mentioned that now is the perfect time to attend training. And whether its a training course or a conference the result will put you as a potential candidate for a role ahead of your competition applying for the same role.

How ever, great example how to organize a very successful conference and how to create a great website supporting that initiative.