Lauri worked for several Fortune 500 companies including Xerox. She discussed the importance of stakeholder management and relationships. There is a shift in power to the masses instead of the elite. And with this there is rising power in emerging markets instead of traditional markets. And as Stephen Covey once said, interdependence instead of independence is they way you create a culture of sharing and trust. What you want is partnership instead of domination; sharing instead of selfishness.
She emphasised the importance of Relationship. If your company does not manage relationships well you will fail. This is relates to key concepts from the Strategic Coach. Stakeholder management is all about managing these relationships. Instead of going into more details here please watch the video podcast interview with Lauri Elliot and see her presentation below for further details.
Elmar Roberg, a past president of the Computer Society, and current president of the Project Management Institute discusses Project Management the State of the Art.
Here is my 2nd video podcast interview with Elmar Roberg:
Elmar quoted Tom DeMarco as saying “people under pressure don’t think twice as fast.” Bad decisions are made when technology is ignored. Project Management is a young profession. And the first body was formed in 1965 is incidentally called Internet. Currently the Project Management Institute globally has over 230,000 members. Prince2 UK certification with 80,000 practitioners.
There is so many strategies and tools available in project management so if you just started using what you got you’ll be better off.
What is a Profession – initial education – accreditation of knowledge requirements – skills development – certification – licensing – professional development – professional societies – code of ethics – organisation certification.
Competence – basic knowledge set – you need to know what you are talking about. You need to have appropriate skills with years.
Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister did series of studies and one of they key findings in teams was that the strongest person is 10 times more productive than the weakest person. The weakest person from a quality perspective will produce 25 times more bugs or mistakes in their programming.
Capable project managers must be employed but just how good is your organisation as a project incubator – reference maturity models.
Elmar is a very vocal speaker generating great enthusiasm while speaking. I can tell for sure that he is very passionate about Project Management. And I would say that project management should be a compulsory course for all Computer Science and Information Systems student from first year through to third and fourth year. The benefits will be substantial in the long term with the quality of projects improving over time. This will bring us into a world class level of competitiveness when we contrast where we are compared to North America, Europe and Asia (especially India) for software development projects.
Here’s Elmar’s presentation with some more details…
Anthony Fitzhenry, CEO of Axiz, and IT Personality of the Year 2006, delivered the opening address at the annual Futurex Conference. The conference is co-located with the Futurex and Equip exhibition, which is possibly the biggest ICT exhibition in Africa. This is really a stunning presentation because it is about you, the consumer and eventually leads you into the opportunities for South African entrepreneurs. The biggest one in my opinion is really creating content for mobile platforms like cellphones and also developing more sophisticated applications like MXit for business or more specifically mobile commerce – allowing consumers to pay with their phones from airtime is a huge opportunity. Just think of 2.4 billion cellphones users vs 1 billion Internet users worldwide.
Here is Anthony’s presentation which you can also download from Slideshare.net. This was one of the highlights from the Futurex Conference, where most of the presentations have been sub-par, especially given the speakers are from the technology industry. This keynote for the 2007 Futurex Conference was in fact the last one where the Futurex branding was used.
