5th PMI Tampa Bay Symposium: My Experience

A couple of weeks ago, I attended and participated in the 5th Annual PMI Tampa Bay Symposium and I was impressed by the caliber of the speakers and by the organization of the event.

It’s the second time I have attended the event, but it was my first as a speaker. Experiencing the event from two different angles gave me a 360° view of what it means to organize and run an event of this magnitude.  It’s even more impressive when you consider that 100% of the event was designed, planned and run by volunteers.  This is something you don’t see every day.

Granted, all PMP certified PMs have to attend these kinds of events due to continuing education requirements (PDU), but this was a good symposium  shwcasing many high quality speakers and very useful seminars.

During the conference I met many Project and Program Managers from the Tampa Bay area and beyond.

I’d like to single out a couple of speakers that I found particularly interesting:

• Carl Pritchard Risk Management workshop; highly entertaining and useful for every manager out there. I talked about it in my previous blog post.
• Tom Sheives’ “Unstuck” lecture and presentation; very interesting to hear about the Panama Canal project and how it failed multiple times and how eventually succeeded and why.  One tip: a true leader listens to the experts even if he/she does not understand the answer that has been given to him/her by them.
• Danny Griffin’s coaching session; not the usual mesh of positive thinking and football - more like cheerleading - attitude but practical tools you can use every day, both at work and at home.

I emphatically recommend this event to not only the PMs out there, but ok to managers and executives.  As a manager myself, I think it is very valuable to listen to PMs talking about their experiences. Those guys have the pulse of what’s working and what’s not, a goldmine for the savvy executive looking for intelligence and tips on how to make their organization successful.