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The Chicagoland chapter of the Professional Management Institute is sponsoring a continuing educational extravaganza in the form of a Professional Development Day Event to be held on November 1st, a little over two and a half weeks from now.

It is going to take place at the Meridian Banquets event center which is located at 1701 W. Algonquin Rd., Rolling Meadows, IL  60008 for those in the Chicagoland area who are thinking of going.    You must register for the event beforehand, and here is the link to the registration page at the PMI-Chicagoland website:

https://m360.pmi-chicagoland.org/event.aspx?eventID=84437&instance=0

This post is designed to give some basic information, but also to give my personal view of the event, since I am on the committee that is helping organize the event.   My role is to organize one of the tracks of educational programming.

1.   Educational Programming

There are four tracks of educational programming:

• Track 1:  Program and Portfolio Management
• Track 2:  Agile, Collaboration & Emerging Trends
• Track 3:  Stakeholder Management/Procurement/Risk Management
• Track 4:  Leadership Lessons from the C Suite

2.  Track 3–Stakeholder Management/Procurement Management/Risk Management

I am organizing Track 3, and the seven presentations we have scheduled so far are:

• 8:00-9:00 AM   Multisourcing:  Moving Beyond Outsourcing, George Wang from Stericycle
• 9:15-10:15 AM   The UL Approach to Risk & Stakeholder Management, Rafael Matuk from Underwriters Laboratories
• 10:30-11:30 AM   Skills for Success:  The Dale Carnegie Approach to Stakeholder Management, Mark Wilson from Dale Carnegi
• 1:15-2:15 PM  Stakeholder Management on the Illinois Tollway Project, Robert Skidmore from Illinois Tollway
• 2:30-3:30 PM  Lean vs. Six Sigma:  Two Sides of the Same Coin?, Brent Tadsen from Adaptive Solutions
• 3:45-4:45 PM  Logical Framework Approach (LFA) to Risk and Stakeholder Management, Terry Schmidt from Management Pro
• 5:00-6:00 PM  High Performing Teams Building the Trump Tower, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (speaker to be determined)

3.  Volunteering

When I was in the Orange County, CA chapter of the Project Management Institute, the President of our Project Manager Toastmasters Club, Lori Shapiro, put together SoTeC, the Southland Technology Conference.    It was lot of work, but she was always so enthusiastic about the project that I frankly envied her involvement in it and wished I could get involved n such an event.   I am in the manufacturing sector, not IT like she is, so I felt that this was not likely to occur.

However, when I came to Chicago at the beginning of this summer, I looked around for opportunities with the Chicagoland chapter of the Project Management Institute.   I talked with the project manager Marcia White at a Toastmasters Training Leadership Institute event, and she put me in touch with Srinivas Saineni who was putting on the Professional Development or PD Day Event this fall.    I told him I wanted to get involved, but that I was new to Chicago and didn’t have very many contacts at all.   Fine, he said, come on board the organizing committee and you’ll make some contacts.    So I was going to gain contacts AND be a part of a great event–definitely a win-win situation!

He took the bold step of making me one of the leads for putting together the tracks of educational programming.   I am involved in this blog in documenting the changeover from the 4th to the 5th edition of the PMBOK Guide, and I wanted to do something with the track that was involved with Stakeholder Management, because that is the new knowledge area PMI has developed in the 5th Edition.

Just imagine it–I thought of the questions that I personally wanted answered that I had been wondering about, and through contacts in the Chicagoland PM community was able to secure speakers from various application areas to give 7 presentations on these very subjects.    It was a daunting task, but I figured if I am wondering about these questions, then I am sure that at least SOME project managers are wondering about the very same questions, and would therefore probably like to hear a presentation on the subject.

To that end, I put together a program and hope that it resonates with those that attend the PD Day Event.    We have over 200 registrants so far, with more registering every day, and I hope that this will bring benefit to the PMI-Chicagoland community, and will be an entry point for me to get to know the local PM community even better!

I’m so glad I volunteered to be on the committee, and will definitely do this next year as well!

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