What a start to PMIEMEA19!
| Today was the first day of #PMIEMEA19 and what a great start to this year's conference. I'm not sure if it was the fantastic Irish hospitality and friendliness or it was just how welcoming the PMI is, but this year's conference is really turning into something special! What makes this conference unique is that there are few other conferences in the world where you will get over 800 Project Professionals, from 70 countries and over 500 different organisations. This gives you a great opportunity to network with your peers and learn so much in such a short period of time. The Keynote session started off with a PMI introduction regarding the aims and celebration that PMI will be doing for their 50th birthday year and including the activities behind the "Year of the volunteer". The keynote speaker this year was: Jamil Qureshi who was giving us his three principles for being a success and more importantly what we think, has an impact on how we feel and subsequently act. Everyone that I've spoken to today, has really taken a lot from his talk and more importantly what they can apply to their daily lives.
The next session that I attended was "Influencing without authority. An essential skill for Project Managers". This was run by Pat Lucey and Norma Lynch who gave their presentation to a packed room. One of the most interesting things for me from this talk was "assuming everyone is a potential ally". I had never really considered this in my stakeholder management but it really did make me think about how I could improve my management skills. Based upon the feedback from this community, I managed to interview Pat and Norma after their session to hear what they thought as first time speakers at a PMIEMEA conference. Next was lunch which is always a great affair during a PMI Conference. It's really nice to see that they have such a great variety of food available which definitely set us up for a great afternoon session.
For me, my next session was Agata Czopek who was giving us advice on how to future proof our career. I really found it interesting to hear how the career path and careers are changing. The main bit of advice that I took from this talk was to: Never stop learning and always be prepared to learn and learn again. The rest of the afternoon for me were about agile planning and learning from agile mistakes which were of great interest to me. One thing that really stood out to me was just how collaborative everyone is about sharing their knowledge and ideas. It really made each session invaluable.
Another feedback from the community was people wanting to know what happens outside of the sessions and I decided to capture two videos today showing you the Networking event and also interviewing a first timer. Here are some more pictures from today's networking event:
This was one of the offerings for food:
This is dessert:
I'd love to know what you'd like to see tomorrow? More interviews with people? or videoing the event sessions? Please comment below! Don't forget to follow us on Twitter at: ProjectMgtcom as well our community correspondents: During the conference (I - Em_The_PM) will be taking over the Twitter feed of Projectmanagement.com to share with you my views on the conference so I'd love to hear what you'd like to see more of! Until tomorrow, have a great evening! |
Date with Delightful Dublin!
| Dia daoibh ar maidin! (“Good morning all” in Irish/Gaelic) Forty days back (Rewind)… Time certainly flies when you’re having fun or anticipating it! Forty days back, an unexpected email tantalized me, promising a date with delightful Dublin, a date that would last at least five days! As a PMI volunteer and volunteer leader since 2005, I’ve been an attendee to 30+ events in several countries, presenting at many. Every single one of them gave me valuable opportunities to learn, share, network, and grow. PMI was inviting me to cover the EMEA Congress 2019 in Incredible Ireland, a country that I had never visited before!
My mother tongue is Tamil, the world’s oldest living language. Skeptical? Go ahead -- Fact check it online! “Do you want to be paid to eat sweet, delicious sugarcane” is a well-known Tamil phrase. Would anyone in their right mind refuse this offer? First steps… Registration was very simple. However, it wasn’t at all easy to select sessions from the amazing variety of topics and speakers for each time slots. You can't have your cake and eat it too, can you? 40 Shades of Green! It was exhausting traveling on a red-eye flight to London, waiting at Heathrow for four hours, and then learning that the connecting flight to Dublin was delayed by an hour. All that fatigue cleared when the pilot announced that we'd shortly land at Dublin. Acre upon acre of many shades of green told me that Dublin was certainly delightful. 'Emerald Isle” is certainly a very apt name for Ireland! Celebrity singer Johnny Cash certainly wasn’t exaggerating when he famously sang about Ireland’s “40 Shades of Green.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0oTDS9ur_U)
Ireland's charm was further enhanced by the genuine warmth of everyone I met, from the immigration officer, the airport employees who guided me to the taxi lines, and the staff who cheerfully and efficiently arranged cab rides. Mohan, the cab driver, told me how the area around the Dublin Convention Centre had transformed from a seedy area with crumbling warehouses. It is now a thriving Finance and IT hub with swanky modern buildings! Let me fast forward back to the present! Day One of the big event has dawned! I really look forward to joining my amazing team members, Emily Luijbregts, Stephanie Jaeger. and Moritz Sprenger in taking you, our valued PMI community member in front of, and behind the scenes of PMI EMEA Congress 2019. We'll cover the key points made by speakers in all important sessions, interview speakers where possible, chat with your peers. Our team coverage will be on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. On this blog too! Stay tuned to for continuous updates all day! Give us feedback and ideas on how we can make our coverage even more exciting! Meanwhile, have a great day, or as they say in Irish, “Bíodh lá maith agat” Today, I plan to attend and cover these great sessions:
Please follow, like, comment, and retweet our continuous coverage on Twitter (https://twitter.com/KarthikPMO), LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/kramamurthy) and Facebook ( https://www.facebook.com/forkarthik ) |
Preserve enthusiasm and multiply value after #PMIEMEA19
| How do you multiply value from attending the EMEA Congress this year? All conferences and technology festivals I have been to specialized in a specific field of technology or market, which I deem not to be my core field of expertise. Attending these events, I took the initiative to learn from the best. It helped me to put the work I was doing as PMO into perspective. Most importantly, my communication with experts on projects has become more effective. I believe this was mostly due to the fact that I made an effort to show genuine interest in the complex work they were doing. That will be different this year at the PMI EMEA Congress. It’s a first for me to attend a PMI Conference. I am expecting an energy boost; a wave I want to keep on surfing. The difference now: the subject matter of the conference is not the field of expertise my current project as PMO is embedded in (Logistics and Flows). I expect limited enthusiasm of the project team in receiving detailed conference reports or being confronted with a healthy portion of PCSD (post-conference stress disorder - John Bonini offers some advice to avoid afflicting your team after such events in his blog post). I thought about three things that will help me to preserve my enthusiasm, share my experience bit by bit, whilst not afflicting anyone around me: 1. Commitment from management to present my top 5 take-aways in 4 weeks time Advice and expert knowledge picked up from speakers, workshops, or conversations during a conference tend not to have a daily-news-type expiry date. I requested to present to management a couple of weeks after the event, sufficient time to step of the conference roller-coaster, reflect on what I have experienced, and bounce back some ideas with project team members. Furthermore, „knowing you will be required to present the information you are gaining at a conference with the team back at the office can help you focus on takeaways and practical interpretations of what’s being presented, instead of what you don’t like or the lacking presentation skills of the presenter", as Lee Odden puts it in his blog. 2. Create and populate a diary of quotes, pictures, slides, notes, and key take-aways I have set up a digital workbook, which will let me organize all the data I collect, including business cards that will be exchanged. I want to be able to refer back to a given information instantly. Setting up the workbook prior to the conference lets me populate it live and at the end of each day, so nothing slips my mind. 3. Multiply the value of the conference by sticking to some established advice Scanning some very useful blog articles on how to make advice stick, it's all about sharing your experience in any form suitable to your target audience, formal or informal. As a project manager I know you are trained in knowing what words, voice, and situation to choose best to get your message across. A coffee or a lunch sets a good scene for me. Do you have any advice on how to multiply value from attending PMI EMEA Congress? Comment below and let the community now. Please don't forget to follow my fellow Community Correspondents for updates during PMI EMEA 2019: Emily, Stephanie, and Karthik. Follow me as well on Twitter or LinkedIn for live-updates during the conference. |
What I’m looking forward to at #PMIEMEA19
| It’s coming up soon! Have you already started thinking about which sessions you’ll attend to get the most of your conference? Do you know where you need to be? Here’s the list of sessions that I cannot wait to see and why. I’d love to hear also about what sessions you’d like to hear more about/ have us cover during the conference itself. First things first: check out the PMI EMEA app and download this. This way you can mark the sessions that you want to attend and get notifications. For now, I’d recommend checking out the programme overview so that you can see the potential sessions that you might want to go and plan out your day. Don’t forget to identify where the break/lunch/networking areas are so that you can know where to grab some food/drink during the conference. There’s also the sponsor area where you can meet providers and get some great input. Day 1:
After each day’s conference, I make notes regarding the key items to learn/remember but also think about other questions that I might want to follow up with the speakers the following day. Day 2:
Day 3:
What topics are you looking forward to? |
How do you choose the sessions you will attend #PMIEMEA19 ?
Categories:
PMI,
Best Practices,
PM Think About It,
Strategy,
Leadership,
Lessons Learned,
Education,
Communications Management
Categories: PMI, Best Practices, PM Think About It, Strategy, Leadership, Lessons Learned, Education, Communications Management
| When attending a major conference or congress like the PMI EMEA Congress 2019 in Dublin is can be confusing which sessions one should attend. I have asked a few of my friends before how they chose which sessions they attend. Here are some of the answers I got: 1. Chose the ones being held by friends, or people I know first, then chose others by the topic I like. 2. Go through all the topics and choose the ones that interest me 3. Use the conference app and put in keywords. 4. It is so confusing and there are so many people I tend to attend those friends of mine attend. Go with the flow 5. Plan in detail, align with goals of what I want to read up on and then choose deliberately. What method do you use to determine which sessions to attend? I have used elements of all of the above before. All have their pros and cons. This time I am going as one of the Community Correspondents and am excited to be sharing my experience and my lessons learned with you. I am also looking forward to be working with Emily and the rest of the team to share the action at the congress with you Please don't forget to follow me and my fellow representatives from the online Community for updates during the conference itself. They'll be announcing themselves during the next few days. |
