Written By Lakisia Jones, PMP

Overview 

On May 18th, the PMI Agile forum presented “Stop Starting, Start Finishing!” by Karen Powell and Douglas Boling. Karen began the presentation by showing two slides of traffic. In the first slide, traffic was flowing smoothly. In the next slide traffic was jammed and at a complete stop. The traffic slides depict what can happen to a project. One day your project is running smoothly. Then suddenly, the project falls behind or may be halted altogether. This is where Kanban can help.

Kanban is not a software development lifecycle methodology, but it can be used to enhance the project management method already in use. Implementing Kanban starts with what you do now. Then identify current processes, existing roles and responsibilities, and job titles. From that foundation, gain agreement to pursue improvement through evolutionary change and encourage acts of leadership at all levels.

Kanban principles include visualizing with a Kanban board, limiting work in progress, managing flow, making policies explicit, implementing feedback loops, improving collaboratively and evolving experimentally. By using Kanban boards, team members can clearly determine work ready to start, work in progress, and work that has been completed. Limiting work-in-progress promotes finishing and improves quality. It also signals when capacity is available. Tracking the date work started and date work completed, enables you to apply metrics that answers when an item will be done, how many can you get done, and how long it will take to complete a certain number of items.

Takeaways

• Why Kanban? Kanban provides relief from overburdening, better quality, and customer satisfaction. It allows you to focus so you can deliver better quality and builds trust within your organization.
• Kanban starts with what you do now, allows you to visualize work and limit work in progress to enable flow.

Next Event

Join us at the next PMI Atlanta Agile forum on June 16, 2020

Keynote Presentation: "Put the Fantastic back in Facilitation" presented by Kate Megaw, President of The Braintrust Consulting Group

Register at www.pmiatlanta.org/events/event-calendar

 About PMI

Atlanta Chapter serves Project Management Community in Metro Atlanta, and we're an active resource to corporations, community and government agencies throughout north Georgia. With over 5,000 members, PMI Atlanta is among the top 5 chapters in the world. Our professional expertise span across industries; we’re the professionals building healthcare information technology systems, the engineers developing smarter public transportation, and the planners growing our communities more efficiently.

Written By Marcia Trajano, PMP

Overview

On February 20th, The PMI Healthcare Forum presented “Emotional Intelligence”, a topic explored by Mark Higham, PMP, PMI-ACP.
Mark began the presentation by defining emotional intelligence and what it represents to us, and discussed four elements of emotional intelligence:

• Internal Focus: Self-awareness & Self-management
• External Focus: Social-awareness & Relationship Development

Referencing the well-known saying, “perception is reality,” Mark shared the importance of managing our emotions and increasing our awareness and understanding of emotional intelligence. Mark moved on to present some tools and techniques to use to accomplish this. These tools and techniques, e.g. self-reflection list; ABCDE model; applying empathy; listening, communication and getting feedback, are centered on the four elements of emotional intelligence and provide a clear approach to this subject. From Self-Awareness to Relationship Development, Mark delved into each of the elements of emotional intelligence, bringing clear and concise definition and examples for the audience to consider.
Participants were engaged with this presentation and the Q&A at the end clearly demonstrated the audience’s interest in the information Mark shared. Highlighting and sharing his personal experiences with emotional intelligence, Mark addressed participant’s questions openly, including sharing reading that had helped him in this area – Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

At the conclusion of this presentation on emotional intelligence, Mr. Higham encouraged the audience to develop an action plan to address this in their personal and professional lives.

Next Event

Join us at the next PMI Atlanta Healthcare forum on Wednesday, March 18, 2020.

Keynote Presentation: Project Management in Chaos by Lee Palmer, Sr. Director, Customer Service Technical Operations, Philips Healthcare

Register at www.pmiatlanta.org/events/event-calendar

About PMI

Atlanta Chapter serves Project Management Community in Metro Atlanta, and we're an active resource to corporations, community and government agencies throughout north Georgia. With over 5,000 members, PMI Atlanta is among the top 5 chapters in the world. Our professional expertise span across industries; we’re the professionals building healthcare information technology systems, the engineers developing smarter public transportation, and the planners growing our communities more efficiently.

Written By Dana Moore

Overview

On Tuesday, February 18, 2020, the PMI Atlanta Chapter - Agile Forum presented “Organizational Culture and Outcome in the Digital Age” by Eric Norman, PMP, CSM, PgMP. Eric’s professional background and experience exhibits distinguished characteristics in this category. Eric Norman is very passionate about this topic as he started out discussing business issues – “we always focus on delivery and not the work we do - an impediment is that we think we have it all figured out” - organizational change.

The presentation focused on three topics:
1) The Missing Organizational Enabler - Organizations are flattening out and they are not engaged or producing expected results. They can improve the capacity of work by eliminating waste.
2) Organization Not Engaged - Organizations are not producing expected results. For example, controlling the criteria, and cost of failure is absolute-failure versus the cost of delay which is not an absolute-failure.
3) Transforming Organizational Culture - Engaging Change Management is a planned approach and can be aligned with necessary changes. For an example, adapt to change with things around you and develop a plan and make it work. Keep in mind the benefits need to be established in the beginning and not in the end, as most organizations lean toward.

Transformation Enablers
1) Strategic Alignment | Align targets, achieve your outcome
2) Communications | Participation across the entire organization
3) Meaningful Metrics | Measured progress
4) Policies and Systems | Reward aligned with your culture
5) Structure | Enable collaboration
6) Stakeholder Engagement | Communicate at all levels
7) Leadership and Delegation | Act in the best interest

 Takeaways

• Agility is not always equal to adaptability
• Adaptability is sensing what is going on around you and respond quickly and effectively
• New Triple constraint is Agility, Adaptability and Opportunity
• For successful organizations, focus on business outcomes and respond to feedback
• Companies that respond to feedback, create culture, and an environment that orients towards successful organizations
• Organizations that focus their attention on the outcome instead of pilot models become more successful

Next Event 

Join us at the next PMI Atlanta Forum, On Tuesday, March 17, 2020.

Register at www.pmiatlanta.org/events/event-calendar

 About PMI

Atlanta Chapter serves Project Management Community in Metro Atlanta, and we're an active resource to corporations, community and government agencies throughout north Georgia. With over 5,000 members, PMI Atlanta is among the top 5 chapters in the world. Our professional expertise span across industries; we’re the professionals building healthcare information technology systems, the engineers developing smarter public transportation, and the planners growing our communities more efficiently.

Written By Paulette Hamilton

Overview

On February 26, 2020 the PMI Atlanta Governance Forum was pleased to host Karen Crumpton White as she spoke on the topic of “Developing Project Managers.” Ms. White shared the details of how she and her peers transform new college graduate interns into project management leaders via the COX LEAD program.

Ms. White spoke about how project managers are expected to be leaders, but few get the opportunity to build and develop their leadership potential in the early stages of their career. As one of the mentors in the COX LEAD program, Ms. White guides college interns as they participate in two months of intense training before they are placed into a rotation where they assume responsibility for projects with budgets from $8,000 to $5M. In the early stages the interns are evaluated and chosen based on certain key characteristics including critical thinking, communications and life-learner attitude. In developing the interns into strong project management leaders, Ms. White stressed that the role of the mentor is crucial.

She spoke about necessary and required mentorship skills stressing that the mentor must invest time into really getting to know the mentee and providing support and clear communications in a trusting environment. Deep listening and finding the driver that is the key to motivating each person are also vital.

Ms. White presented ideas in a very personable way inviting the audience to participate in a discussion rather than listening to a speech. There were some interesting interactive discussions and  questions during and after the talk which underlined the relevance of this topic to governance. Developing project management leaders in the early stages of their career can bring innovative ideas to project governance.

Takeaways

• Building project management leadership qualities early in a PMs career can be of great benefit to both the PM and the organization.
• Excellent mentors give clear communications about what is expected from the mentee.
• When you invest the time to develop the leadership potential of new PMs you strengthen the entire project management team.

Next Event

Join us at the next PMI Atlanta Governance forum on May 27, 2020

Register at www.pmiatlanta.org/events/event-calendar

About PMI

Written By Deborah Johnson, MBA, MPH, PMP

Overview

On February 11^th, 2020, Michael Pink, CEO of SmartPM Technologies, Inc. was the featured presenter at the Architecture Engineering & Construction (AEC) Forum.

Michael Pink drew from his 17 years of experience in the construction industry, with roles in Program Management, Risk Advisory and Dispute Resolution. He showed how schedule delays, cost overruns, and how disputes can be avoided. He noted that on average 75% of construction projects are delayed and 59% are over budget; costing the construction industry trillions of dollars each year.

The problem? Schedule analysis is not planned for or conducted until things have become problematic. This can be due to over-optimism at the onset and fear to face the implications of delays (time, scope and money). 

The solution? Construction schedule analytics. The construction schedule is the most powerful yet most misunderstood data set in construction.  The schedule goes far beyond a planning tool.  It is the sole analytical tool that shows how everything is inter-related.  These shared relationships are clearly defined across all processes in all projects.

As CEO of SmartPM Technologies, Inc, Michael Pink has developed a technology that regularly analyzes schedule quality, delays, compression, feasibility and risk on construction projects. This technology can perform an accurate critical path analysis with minimum human involvement and happens to be the only technology of its kind.

Takeaways

For project success, intensive schedule analysis should occur from the very onset of the project throughout the life of the project. Analysis check points include:

• SCHEDULE QUALITY – Built based on best practices, sound logic and realistic expectations
• SCHEDULE DELAY – adjusted to cover potential risk
• SCHEDULE RECOVERY – to make sure all parties understand the in-progress decisions being made on a regular basis
• FEASIBILITY – based on historical data
• PREDICTIVE ANALYSIS

Next Event

Join us at the next PMI Atlanta AEC on Tuesday, March 10th, 2020.

Keynote Presentation: "Curiosity Lab at Peachtree Corners" presented by Greg Ramsey, PE, Director of Public Works & Engineering

Register at www.pmiatlanta.org/events/event-calendar

About PMI

Atlanta Chapter serves Project Management Community in Metro Atlanta, and we're an active resource to corporations, community and government agencies throughout north Georgia. With over 5,000 members, PMI Atlanta is among the top 5 chapters in the world. Our professional expertise span across industries; we’re the professionals building healthcare information technology systems, the engineers developing smarter public transportation, and the planners growing our communities more efficiently.