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.

Tomorrow Morning i am heading of to the PMOZ 2008 Conference, that will happen this year in Melbourne. The benchmark that has been set by the conference in 2007 while it happened at the Gold Coast in a very inspiring and great location, the Conrad Jupiters, with a great dinner function, valuable workshops and speaker topics is very high.

The conference is definitely one that atracts the market across all different Project Management approaches as it try’s to pitch it that way. So we see all the different organisations and best pratices represented on these days, whether its Prince2, PMI (Project Management Institute) or AIPM (Australian Institute of Project Management) or even AIM (Australian Institute of Management). Another benefit is, that the Participants are not just across the different approaches but also across the different industries.

Abstract out of the PMOZ pitch:

The Project Management Australia Conference (PMOZ), is the leading Project Management Conference in Australia and is managed by PMGlobal. PMGlobal through the PMOZ, World Project Management Week Conference and PMASIA brands have a long term commitment to advancing Project Management skills in Australia and around the world.

Now in its fouth year PMOZ will once again offer a range of dynamic and exciting presentations encompassing all aspects of “creating success” from the high level concepts of translating strategy into action through the tools and techniques employed at the coalface to make individual projects a success.

Beside the participants and the speakers, the program does look very attractive.

7 Streams

• Business and ICT
• Corporate and Governance
• Construction, Mining and Engineering
• Transformation
• PMO Session
• Soft Skills for Project Managers
• Case Studies

and speaker program spread over 2 days.

Presentations that i will definitely attend:

• Graham Scott - Relationships As Risk and the need for there effective management in projects
• Robert Hall PMP® - Delivering significant business benefit through targeted minor projects
• Khaled Hamdy PMP® - Program Management Office Maturity in a Large Government Organization
• Alam Nur - UIAchieving Project Management success in a large organisation with virtual teams
• Anastasia Dzenowagi - What will be the future of the PMO in a Complex World?
• Pat Byrne - Understanding the complexity of Program Management
• Kersti Nogeste PMP® - Start from the very beginning: Define expected benefits in the Project Business ase
• Geoffrey Ball - Project Management Practices for successfully delivering radical business change
• Scott Spence - Business As Usual vs Projects – the organisational dilemma

So whoever else is coming, i will see you there. Feel free to join my presentation on “Effective Project Health Check” which i will record and publish after the event including the slides that you will be able to view here and download on slideshare.