PMI Global Congress 06

This week I attended the Project Management Institute’s annual Global Congress conference (http://congresses.pmi.org/) in Seattle. Thousands of the 200,000+ PMI organization’s members from around the work converged on the Washington State Conference Center Oct 21 – 27. To me, the growth in PMI membership and its annual conferences are signs of the increasing size and complexity of projects, especially information technology and information systems projects, the complexity of multinational organization, and the need for a common language and standards for project management.

Personally, I was a little disappointed with the conference. Although there was some good material and lots of vendors, many of the sessions I attended were poorly presented or the content was simply not detailed enough to be useful. I am a member of the local Puget Sound PMI chapter and have attended some good local meetings and seminars and so I was expecting more out of the Global Congress. In addition, there were very few really technical sessions pertaining to IT or IS. This was puzzling to me because the largest special interest group at PMI is the Information System SIG.

In my two days at the conference I attended sessions on risk management, work breakdown structures, business process optimization, healthcare IT organizations, earned value, and communications for dispersed teams. A few highlights below.

Monday’s Keynote: “Countdown to Leadership”, Astronaut Mike Mullane

Col. Mullane is a West Point grad and flew on the 12th shuttle space mission. He gave an interesting and inspirational talk about the fundamental traits of good teams. He spoke about the following things being part of the teamwork framework:

• Normalization of Deviance. The natural tendency of teams to accept lower and lower standards of quality and performance over time. Issues that arise are therefore “Predictable Surprises”. He gave the example of the 0-ring failure of the shuttle Challenger accident in 1986. It was actually a well known, well-documented problem that was in a way pushed aside (despite many protests) by the pressure to complete more shuttle missions. In general he suggest tools against this type of issue are to know your vulnerabilities, stick to your plan, consider your instincts, and learn from your mistakes.
• Responsibility. Col. Mullane talked about his very first mission on an F4 fighter plan where he and the other pilot ignored the procedure for determining your return flight fuel requirements and they ended ejecting from the cockpit as the jet crashed into the landing strip because they ran out of fuel. He explained that he failed his responsibility as a team member by bypassing protocol. He says this general phenomenon is because of people’s: reluctance to confront, need for acceptance, position and longevity inhabitants, assume other will take action, not my job, fear of boss. He recommends everyone has a Sacred Responsibility to maintain team presence and don’t become a passenger. He quoted Andrew Jackson: “One person with courage forms a majority”.
• Courageous Self Leadership. At age 33 Col. Mullane’s father got polio and spent the rest of his life in a wheel chair. His wife and he never game up raising their six kids and never lamented their situation. This has a huge impact on Col. Mullane. He said that although he was an unremarkable youth he always challenged himself and set lofty goals. He suggests: make corrections in your life, always do you best and educate yourself, never give up and stay focused.

“Risk Management as a Framework for Organization Success”, Dr. David Hillson (RiskDoctor.com)

Dr. Hillson’s talk focused on risk management as the key to bridging the gap between strategy and tactics. Its all about making objectives better aligned with business goals. In order to do this he recommends a hierarchical approach to risk management integrated at every level: corporate, strategic, program, project, and task. He defined total risk management as looking at not just the risks but also the opportunities and not just the from a tactical standpoint but also a strategic level. This is what many organizations miss he says. This integrated approach will implement risk managmenet processes at every level of the organization by different people.

Organizations that are “risk mature”:

• Have a common language and understanding of risk management
• Common processes (for raising and dealing with risk issues)
• Supportive, risk-aware culture
• Committed, competent, and professional people who want to understand and manage risk

“Setting Up a Project Management Office in a Healthcare IT Organization”, Laura Aziz, PhD

Dr. Aziz was one of the best speakers that I saw at the conference. She recounted her years of experience running IT project in healthcare institutions. Part of her discussion could be applicable to many IT projects but she did say that Healthcare IT was unique because you really had to know the healthcare industry to be successful because of:

• Regulations, cultures, and the technicalness of much of the business. ER, OR, Ambulatory care all have their own unique needs


• In order to be successful you must involve the organizations clinicians in the strategy and planning. Get a champion


• Your IT projects are really just enables for what the clinical side of the organization wants to do. Don’t forget this


• Relationships are critical. Reach out to clinicians and other parts of the organization


• Don’t forget about the “customers”—the patients and their families

“The Project Management Facilitator”, Tammy Adams and Jan Means

These two woman gave a good, basic review of tools that a facilitator should use to focus projects. They did note that a facilitator is a different role than a project manager. A project manager sometimes needs to be a facilitator, and sometimes needs to be a driver. The discussed the following focusing techniques:

• Objectives – all meetings should have them, make them clear, send them out ahead of time


• Action Items – Clear, assigned, and tracked by the project manager


• Parking Lot – Where you put items that are not directly relevant to the meeting. The PM tracks


• Agenda – have one, publish it, bring it to the meeting


• Ground rules – may be necessary to set operating rules for behavior and procedure


• Time boxing – only allow a certain amount of time to resolve issues


• Nominal group technique – for difficult issues, get written thoughts from participants. Like Delphi technique


• Scoping – it may be necessary to create a list of things as they come up and categorize them as out of scope of the project or meetings


• Glossary – publish and keep it up to date so there is a common language


• 5 Minute Rule – If someone is more than 5 minutes late, they can’t talk for 5 minutes. They need to get themselves up to speed somehow


• Exec Time – to handle execs who are constantly late and then derail a meeting, ask them to come at the end and allot time to fill them in

“Expedient Communications for Dispersed Teams”, Bryan McConachy

Mr. McConachy discussed how complex communications are and tools to use to expedite communications. He states that “Most problems in projects can be tracked to some kind of communication failure”. Part of this he says is the complexity of human communication. No only are there 3 parts to the brain and 2 sides there are multiple different communication channels (hearing, body language, etc) there are factors like culture, trust, emotion, stress, etc. He believes that “unless trust develops quickly [in a project], you many never develop trust at all”. As far as efficiency face-to-face communication is the most affective and text (esp abbreviated short hand cell phone text messages) are the most inefficient and the most likely to result in communication problems. Dispersed team communication is hard because there is less face to face interaction and informal communication goes down dramatically. Mr. McConachy recommends having policies around communications and especially usage for things like email and text messaging. He feels a code of conduct is critical and uses and mis-uses of emails should be spelled out clearly.