Invited to speak to congress!

To be honest, it’s not the US Congress, it’s the PMI Global Congress, but still, I’m pretty excited!

My friend and PRINCE2 guru (everyone should have a PRINCE2 guru) Jay Siegelaub and I will be co-presenting our thoughts on using the PRINCE2 methodology to define a PMO (that’s Project Management Office for those of you not into the whole PM scene).  Jay has been training my company in PRINCE2 for many years now and we’ve shown tremendous business benefit through its use.  Over the last 18 months we’ve been building an IT PMO, running the implementation as a PRINCE2 project.  It’s been great fun and the lessons learned drove quality and acceptance into the Project Management processes we’ve developed.

We put our presentation proposal together back in December and have been anxiously awaiting a decision.  Today we learned that we were accepted as presenters.  So now “all” that remains is to write a paper, develop that into a slide deck (I’m wondering how the Beyond BulletPoints approach could be useful here….), prepare for the presentation, and then show up and deliver it to a room full of Project Management wizards!  All this while holding down our day jobs and living on opposite sides of the country.  What, me worry?!  :-)

Honestly, I couldn’t be more excited.  And hey, I’m betting these people will appreciate the topic more than the US Congress would have anyway.

Here’s the abstract for our presentation:

“Walking the Walk: Using Our Methodology to Build Our Project Office”

All too often when implementing a company approach to project management, the implementation of the methodology and deployment of the project office follow the “old way” of doing business.  Yet there is a wonderful opportunity to build a better methodology by using the proposed methodology in the implementation itself!    

No-one has the luxury of stopping the roller-coaster of day-to-day work demands to develop a new approach to project management.  With our chosen methodology in hand we had to continue running dozens of active projects without the benefit of consistent processes being applied to them. Similar to laying the track as the train is making its way down the rails, we needed to develop our new processes, roll them out, and fit those processes into both the new projects and the existing ones – all at the same time.

We chose to implement PRINCE2™ as our Project Management Methodology. Our talk won’t focus on how we chose this methodology over others. Instead, it will describe an approach to building a Project Management Office using the actual processes it embodies, including staffing, prioritization of efforts, process development, mobilizing commitment for change, training, refining, and maintaining, all while keeping the business running and continually striving it improve customer satisfaction with our project delivery.

Sound like fun?  Then come to Denver to see us this October!

~ by brianherman on April 23, 2008.