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.

For everybody, like myself, who haven’ t been able to attend the PMI Global Congress in Denver, Hal Macomber who is running the Blog Reforming Project Management and Josh Nankivel running the Blog PM Student, and both members of PMI’s New Media Council are providing their view on the congress.

Hall talks in his post  about the prominent keynote speaker, Colin Powell 

Colin Powell was the keynote speaker on Sunday afternoon for a crowd of 3,000. That followed his Obama endorsement on Meet the Press Sunday morning. The general was there to speak about leadership. He challenged project managers to bring leadership to every project team. He kept our attention with one story after another and his great humor. I counted 4 standing ovations.

Josh touches on the highlights at the congress, for example meeting with Gregory Balestrero, the CEO of PMI

Greg discussed PMI’s strategy going forward and we were able to ask some questions and give some feedback.  I suggested PMI work with thought leaders of new methodologies such as Critical Chain, Lean, SCRUM and other Agile methods, etc.  It sounds like they will be doing some of this with the Virtual Communities (at least with Agile).

From what I am reading on the web and in all various blog articles, it was a great event and shame I couldn’t go. Wouldhave been a long journey from Brisbane to Denver anyway. I might join the one in Kuala Lumpur next year and facilitating a workshop. Will see.

I have just returned from my first “conference” organised by IQPC. The question that I wanted to answer by looking closely at the event, whether it’s worth going.
The answer is -> if you can afford it -> Yes!
So the question is -> why ?

The Concept is a boutique conference that is targeting and audience of between 40 to 60 people for a niche topic like “Project Risk Management” or “Road & Rail Infrastructure” or “Negotiation Skills for Contracting”. So aiming at a very specialised Audience. The advantages that come with that is you will just see your peers in the audience which is a great networking opportunity and you are able to share experiences and issues and find resolutions or new ideas immediately. At regular conferences you have to identify your potential peers and topics to talk about as the audience is bigger and wider spread. The presentations are focusing on the particular topic and just on that.

Yes, IQPC is a marketing company, that’s there bread and butter, its all about bumps on seats and sometimes they take it a little bit to far as some of the participants fead back to me, in finding and identifying addresses to send their little flyers to with programs of upcoming events. Aggressive but positive for them. How ever, just with that concept they are able to taylor and identify the audiences required to fill an event and make it worthwhile for the participants.

The feedback forms will and can be used to identify high qualified speakers and make sure that they are speaking at the next event for a similar topic. And those feedback forms have been used a lot by the participants. Jacquie Bran, one of the General Managers for IQPC, stays in close contact with the presenters and makes sure that both parties are able to benefit from each other.

The Masterclass and the Workshops, which is somehow the frame for the conference, are intimate events that are great for sharing experiences and lessons learnt. And that’s because they are so small from an audience perspective and participants get a lot out of that approach.

Yes, its expensive, but as i mentioned in my previous post, if you have a company paying for it that’s great, if not and you find it to expensive, GO and SPEAK and PRESENT as you get the conference for free (beside the time you have to spend preparing and are out of your job). In other conferences speakers just  get a discount and need to pay that discounted price for the conference.

A lot of participants wondered that neither the Speakers nor the Chairman do get anything out of that (beside a potential compensation for travel and accommodation). The speakers expose themselves to the audience, will get feedback after the presentation by talking to people as well as based on the feedback forms and have a reason to prepare a topic and make it a presentation which forces preparation and research and as long as that concept works to engage speakers, why change. The only with that is, that many speakers from the Government are attracted as they do not have to take a day off for that as they can prepare the presentation during their “working time” as well as present as “working time”. Might be a reason why we had a lot of presentations from the Government.

What to improve:

Speaker selection and topic selection could be a little improved. Sometimes the speakers have been selected and the topic was already printed in the Program therefore the speakers had to squeeze their presentation into the topic. Also some of the speakers have not been exposed to IQPC before they have been selected, so no QA took place, which is quite a risk. How ever, Jacquie mentioned that this is the exception and almost everybody gets spoken to prior before they are selected, and the clear evidence of that was that Jacquie had to rush off one evening to do a telephone call with a potential speaker out of Denmark.

There should be the option to do networking in the evening, like a dinner function or networking at the bar. Most of the delegates stayed at the venue anyway, so would have been a good option to enforce that especially between the 1st and 2nd day of the conference. As most of us enjoyed talking to the peers this would provide another option to make the event even more valuable.

Just returned from the IQPC Project Risk Management Conference with Food for Thought and a Summary on all 4 days that I attended and participated in.



1) Masterclass by Kathleen  Kuryl

A very well conducted and facilitated Workshop by Kathy (President of the Tasmanian AIPM Chapter) and even if she was that nervous that she had to get up at 0530 in the morning you could see a thing of that . We got a lot of insights of the Project Methodology that has been put together by her and her team and is fully available on their website. The session was very much focused on the Risk Management component of the method itself. Kathy printed a lot of material and provided that as a hand out for the participants (overall around 7). The Masterclass was very intimate due to the fact that we just had a small audience like this and Kathy got a very good discussion going which helped us to understand how Risk Management is being applied by other industries. Another perception was that Government and Construction was very well represented in the Masterclass and in the overall conference. 

In the Afternoon we focused on a couple of areas. 

• How to present a risk profile to various audiences like stakeholders, steering group members, team members etc. (will have another post on that soon)?
• How to practical apply Risk Management in you day to day project management work?
• How to facilitate a risk assessment with an immature audience?

Another good point, that was raised, was that Lessons Learnt that you do after a project or a phase / stage has finished should drive and influence future risk assessments. So a two page summary of the outcome of a lessons learnt session was recommended (1. Area of project to get the reader to understand if they run a similiar project, set the context etc.; 2. Circumstances and Situation the project was running in; 3. Scope of project; 4. The Lessons Learnt summary)

2) Two days of conference

11 presentations and two interactive discussions, and each one of them scheduled for 45 minutes, plenty of time and opportunities to network was the structure for these days. Around 50 to 60 participants and everyone of them actively working in the Project Risk Management area, in one or the other role.

The three presentation highlights for me have been

1. Liam Wallace from ASC - about Comprehensive Risk Identification, Analysis and Planning
   Liam came across very knowledgeable and for sure coming out of a mature organisation where Risk Management is enforced and embraced. He has given us practical examples of risk registers, presentation options of risk profiles, their risk appetite and how they change the risk appetite according to the project. The “Heat Map” was definitely a very valuable tool that ASC is using to present risks to board members. He also referred to that how to identify risks constantly and how you can keep that simple. The slides have been great in a way they can be used for further reference, depending on how much he was allowed to put on the CD that was handed out.
    
2. Eddie Stewart from Newcastle City Council - about Applying Project Structure
   Eddie was talking about how Project Management Frameworks and Risk Management Strategies go together and his slides were just great as they provide a great reference to how the Newcastle City Council does Project Management and how they run projects and, most interesting, what projects they are running, which for somebody like me out of the private business environment was quite interesting. From an asset management side of thinks IT people often just think about PCs and Monitors and that such as assets, but for the City Council there are more than 70.000 trees and every tree is treated as an asset with additional information about size and age etc. Make sure you get a hands on the slides as they provide a good point of reference.
    
3. Rob Loader - Analysing the complexity of stakeholder management
   Rob was talking about the difficulties as well as critical success factors around Stakeholder Management in the context of risk management and was referring to the challenges how to understand your stakeholder, why you need to understand them and how. So referring to the question how you can understand a stakeholder that you never get exposed to he gave a couple of examples like waiting at the elevator until he shows up and give him the “elevator pitch” or wait for him at the car park near his car and give him the “car pitch” or just go and constantly ask for 15 minutes of his time. But clear advice was, you need to understand him and do everything to achieve that. His slides are another good point of reference. Clearly visible that Rob has done plenty of presentations in his career.

Regarding the interactive discussions about budget forecasting and software for risk management I dont know whether the delegates got much out of that. Haven’t had and heard much feedback around that area, but at least the crowd was engaged and shared experiences to the audience. Which helped for the networking as you knew whom to talk to about specific topics.

3) The Workshop - How to Identify, Measure and Manage Risk Throughout the Life Cycle of the Poject

We had a couple of cases prepared for this conference plus a short introduction of the Diamond Model based on the book “Reinventing Project Management” by Aaron J. Shenhar and Dov Dvir and how it could be used as tool to start facilitating a risk assessment and to present a risk profile of a project. A great discussion we had, around the model its use and how different industries and their projects are related to the model and how the projects could be mapped with the model. After that we had another very good discussion around how to embed a simple risk process in your day to day work and how to present risks to various audiences and several great ideas got shared between the attendees. Again, a very intimate workshop which was probably the biggest asset as this helped to facilitate a good discussion and sharing of ideas amongst the participants. The area around how to present risks created so many ideas that i need to summarize them later on in a different post.

Bottom Line

I perception is that the concept of a boutique conference style focused on niche topics really works. You find your audience (Gavin Halling for example is selling a risk management tool and he cant get a better audience than this for selling it), you find your peers to talk about issues and getting ideas how to resolve them, you build your network to be able to be more successful in your role and depending on the topics and speakers you might get great content and knowledge you can walk away with. The only downside is, that the conference has a price which some might not be willing to or even cant afford. Thats why we havent seen many people out of IT and other industries beside Construction, Engineering and Government. So here is my advice, if you have your Company paying for it -> GO, if you do not or you cant afford it your self -> PRESENT as you are able to get to the conference for free.