Challenge: How can you make a great first impression during a networking event?

Guest contributor, Lisa DiTullio, shares her suggestions and tips for making the most of your 2 second best impression.

I recently met Ann at a networking event, her name tag read "DIVA". It didn't take long during my brief exchange with the DIVA to form a first impression - not long at all. In fact, according to Malcolm Gladwell, we are able to size someone up in just two seconds - it's the power of our adaptive unconscious. In recognition of Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, let's celebrate the power of the glance.

When encountering someone new, first impressions count. This is particularly true when networking with others - you want to leave a positive, memorable impact when meeting for the first time. Through observation and measurement you can improve your presence and connection - ideally to leverage the encounter for lasting value.

Think about your first contact with someone. Do you exhibit the following qualities to make you stand out and be remembered in a positive manner?

1. Confident: Do you inspire others? Do you speak in a sure way? Are you poised and level-headed?
2. Credible: Do you have expertise and can you be trusted? How often can you persuade others?
3. Capable: Do you have what it takes to get the job done? Are you an efficient, effective and expert in your field?
4. Calm: Do you remain unruffled during turbulent times?
5. Clean: Do you have a neat appearance? Can you speak in plain language; get right to the point; present fresh ideas?
6. Charisma: Can you use your personal being, rather than speech or logic alone, to interact with others in a real and meaningful way?
7. Connections: Do you establish lasting relationships?

Everything you do during the first 2 seconds of an interaction speaks volumes, especially your actions:

• Do you maintain direct eye contact during dialogue?
• What do you do with your hands when you communicate?
• Do you face the other person in an "open" pose?
• Can you stand still? Do you jiggle your feet, your knee, or your leg?
• Are you aware of your facial expressions?
• How's the pitch of your voice? Do you speak clearly?

Bring a buddy to the next networking event. Ask your pal to observe you from a distance - solicit honest feedback when the event is over - How did you do? What did you do? Focus on a few improvement opportunities and try again, but make it quick.

Now its time for you to join the conversation - Share your ideas, suggestions and thoughts on what the successful project manager looks like on our discussion on LinkedIn.

Contributor: Lisa DiTullio (Lisa DiTullio & Associates)

ProjectWorld & The World Congress for Business Analysts will take place November 14-16, 2011 at Disney's Contemporary Resort in Orlando, FL. Interested in speaking at this year's conference? Click here for details.
Be sure to visit www.projectworld.com for tools, articles, templates and event updates.

CALL FOR PRESENTERS: ProjectWorld® & World Congress for Business Analysts® 2011

As a reader of the ProjectWorld & The World Congress for Business Analysts blog, the Institute for International Research invites you to submit a proposal to present at the 2011 ProjectWorld® & World Congress for Business Analysts® conference. Papers are being accepted on a rolling basis, we suggest you submit your proposal as early as possible. The event will take place November 14-16, 2011 at Disney's Contemporary Resort in Orlando, FL.

About this unique event:
PW&WCBA is the industry's year round resource for gaining cutting-edge insights through C-Level case studies & corporate best practice presentations, exclusive Web Seminars, Learning Labs, including the Annual PMO Forum and the Annual Portfolio Management Forum.

Who and what are we looking for?
Experienced corporate practitioners, industry experts and qualified facilitators sharing innovative case studies, techniques and templates that attendees can implement as soon as they get back to the office. Each presentation should demonstrate at least three tangible takeaways. We are looking for high caliber, unbiased, industry speakers sharing real stories from within the trenches.

Please note: Decisions will be based on the alignment of the content with the 2011 agenda content, feedback from the event advisors as well as on industry recognition and/or personal references. We expect our speakers to move beyond the fundamentals.

We expect our speakers to move beyond the fundamentals.
2011 Presentation Topic Areas include, but are not limited to:

• What's New in Agile?
• Agile, Tools and Metric Tracking
• Cloud Risk: Managing the Risk and Rewards of Cloud Computing
• Defining and Developing the Next Generation of PMs
• Improving the Value of Your PMO
• IT Portfolio Management
• Soft Leadership Skills
• Risk Management
• Building Program Management Expertise
• Motivating Teams and Increasing Team Performance
• Creating a Center of Excellence (Both BA and/or PM)
• Demonstrating the Current Value of Project Management and Business Analysis to Your Organization
• Career Paths for the BA and PM - Where Do You Go After 5 Years?
• Using Six Sigma and LEAN to Improve Project Management
• Requirements Management and Communication
• Funding Models in a Tight Financial Market
• Leading Global Teams
• Change Management
• Reading Verbal and Non-Verbal Cues
• Virtual Engagement
• Lightweight Project Management Tools vs. Heavyweight
• Enterprise Analysis
• Enterprise Architecture
• The Mechanics of Business Process Modeling
• Negotiation Skills for Dealing with Suppliers
• Improved Elicitation Techniques
• Developing Excellent Scoping Skills
• Agile Project Management
• A Systematic Approach to Increase Business Process Performance
• Improving Service Levels with Your Stakeholders
• Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring
• Developing a PM Toolkit: The Essentials
• Implementing a Portfolio Management
• Risk Management
• Estimating and Identification of Requirements
• Business Rules: An Important Technique to Capture and Discover What You Need
• Green Practices for the PM and BA
• Getting the Benefits of Consolidating, But Without Doing So
• The Current and Future State of the BA
• Identify and Retain the Best and the Brightest
• Agile: Governance and Decision-Making
• Sustainable Portfolio Management Practices
• Development Techniques that are Flexible and Responsive
• SOA Governance
• Integrating the Business Architecture with Human Performance

BONUS: In addition to the exposure and honor of being a speaker, speakers will also receive FREE admission to the conference, access to the post-conference web seminar series as well as any pre-conference activities ($3,000+ value).

How to Get Accepted:
Priority will be given to presentations that highlight NEW case studies on pushing beyond the PMBOK and BABOK, presenting new skills, techniques and best practices for today's PM and BA worlds. ONLY corporate/client-side speaker will be considered. If you are a consultant, solution provider, technology provider, analyst or consultant, please see sponsorship/exhibit section below.

Interested in sponsoring or exhibiting?
If you are a vendor or solution provider and are interested in showcasing your organization's expertise - Please contact Jon Saxe, Senior Business Development Manager at jsaxe@iirusa.com or 646-895-7467 for more information.

If you were not selected to present and are a vendor or solution provider, you may qualify for additional speaking opportunities available through sponsorship.

CALL FOR PRESENTERS:
For consideration, please e-mail apowers@iirusa.com with the following information by Friday, April 1, 2011:
• Proposed speaker name, job title, and company name
• Contact information including address, telephone and e-mail
• Title of Presentation (one line, benefit focused)
• A brief summary of content to be delivered (no more than 75 words), followed by 3 bullet points of what the audience will gain from your presentation (key audience takeaways)
• Previous conference speaking opportunities for the last 3 years
• Short bio of speaker (50-75 words)
• Two references with contact information

NOTE: If your proposal is selected, portions of this submission will be printed in the brochure.

Additional Details:
• Commercialism and self-promotion are NOT permitted or tolerated. If this happens, you will NOT be invited to return as a speaker.
• Travel, lodging and other expenses are the responsibility of the speaker.

Thank you for your interest in PW&WCBA.
All the best,

The ProjectWorld & The World Congress for Business Analysts Team
ProjectWorld® & World Congress for Business Analysts webpage
Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Project_World

What Happens When A Project Fails?

We might not want to acknowledge it, but failure happens. Goals sometimes don't get met, time-lines slip, projects fall apart. How do you react when faced with failure? And as a leader, how do you prevent small failures from snowballing into a completely failed project.

This blog post on the Harvard Business Review caught my eye as a unique illustration of the different ways people deal with failure.

In the post author and Bregman Partners, Inc. CEO Peter Bregman writes:

Most of us miss that. Typically, when people fail, we blame them. Or teach them. Or try to make them feel better. All of which, paradoxically, makes them feel worse. It also prompts defensiveness as an act of self-preservation. (If I'm not okay after a failure, I'd better figure out how to frame this thing so it's not my failure.)

Who hasn't been there? Or on the receiving end? It's a natural instinct to try and distance oneself from failure in a business situation, but a good leader needs to take a step back, evaluate, and decide what their team needs in each case. Is this the time for cutting losses? Learning a lesson? Or simply practicing acceptance.

What skills and practices do you employ when dealing with the failure of a project? What failures have you faced, and how have you put things back on track?

ProjectWorld® & World Congress for Business Analysts 2011

It may seem like the distant future, but ProjectWorld® & World Congress for Business Analysts is beginning to gear back up for 2011. The Call For Presenters is now open, so submit your proposals as soon as possible.

In the months to come, what are some topics you would like to see covered here on the Project World blog? Potential topics for the 2011 conference that we would like to touch on in the next several months include:
• Agile
• Cloud Computing
• IT Portfolio Management
• Motivating Teams and Increasing Team Performance
• Demonstrating the Current Value of Project Management and Business Analysis to Your Organization
• Developing a PM Toolkit
and more. Visit the ProjectWorld® & World Congress for Business Analysts website for more ideas.

What is missing? What topics are you most excited to hear about? Would you be interested in contributing to the Project World blog? Let us know in the comments, or email me at mleblanc@iirusa.com.

A Place for Face-To-Face Meetings?

Last week I was thinking about computing in the cloud, and even today I was pulling files off of Basecamp for another project. However, being in the events business, buzz on The Harvard Business Review and The Economist blogs about the value of face to face meetings definitely pulled me back down to earth.

When you're managing a project, how important do you feel face to face meetings are? Additionally, where do you place the value of networking events and conferences in contrast to online networking or webinars?

On The Harvard Business Review blog, Stephen Greer writes

"The most important aspect of these meetings is that they weren't blaming sessions. We shared successes and best practices — and learned from challenges."

To me, that is often the value of attending conferences, the opportunity to be inspired by thought leaders and peers, and also to share best practices and experiences. You might learn as much or more sharing "war stories" (and successes!) during a networking event or over coffee between sessions as you do during the sessions themselves. Similarly, inspiration may strike or your team may gel during the down time of a face to face meeting in a way that just isn't possible during a con call or by email.

Where do you stand? Would you just as soon save the networking for twitter? Or are you looking for some face time?

Computing in The Cloud: Where To Begin?

Today on the Project_World twitter feed I couldn’t help but notice a number of people tweeting about “Planio”—a cloud based collaboration and project management tool. It’s hard to say with twitter sometimes which of those tweets may have been sponsored, but it still got my attention.

Regardless of industry, more and more companies are looking towards cloud-based solutions like this for collaboration. From sharing documents and calendars in Google to paying for a solution such as those by PPM vendor Innotas discussed here there are a wide variety of ways to take your activities to the cloud. So many in fact that a simple web search for “cloud based project management tools” turns up overwhelming results (and frankly, lots of advertisements, but few clear reviews).

Cloud-based tools can be greener—less need to print and share documents or emails—and can be easier to access for telecommuters or team members in external offices. Clients won’t have to install new software on their computers, and in an era when Internet is ubiquitous, it just seems to make sense.

The question is, how to decide what program will work for your company or project? We’d love to hear from you about successes or failures with SaaS (Software as a Service) providers. What works and what doesn’t? What factors were key in deciding what to use? Share with us in the comments or e-mail me.

Ellen Gottesdiener PW&WCBA Agile Summit 2010

Originally posted at http://www.agilescout.com/

Plan for the future with Arthur Shelley

When you get back to the office those list of great ideas from the conference has now evaporated. Always remember to record lessons learned and things you want to bring to your business.” – Arthur Shelley

“What will you do when get back to the office? If you don’t do anything you’re losing actionable knowledge.” – Arthur Shelley

“Turn potential into value.” – Arthur Shelley

These are a few of the key take a ways Arthur talked about in his presentation at PWWCBA 2010


Amanda Powers (producer) started the conference off.

Here was the schedule!





















Originally posted at agilescout.com

Mary Gorman Says Agile Requirements Not an Oxymoron

Mary Gorman speaking on Agile Requirements: Not an Oxymoron

Requirements are the basis for product development.

So why is Agile requirements not an oxymoron?

Mary had us do an exercise that helped elicit from the group a current state of how people feel about requirements practices for traditional and Agile.

Software development has a lot of interdependencies and complexities.

“Agile requirements planning – We need to look at value first and continually prioritize.”

Agile analysis roadmap:

◦Product – Big-view (Product roadmap – Shaped by the vision, value, goals, and objectives)
◦Release – Pre-view (Product Backlog and Release Plan)
◦Iteration/WIP – Now-view (Iteration Backlog)
Agile development effort:

◦Requirements need to be just enough to begin
◦Requirements need to be testable with user acceptance criteria
◦Requirements have to have a definition of “done”
Ways to visualize work:

◦Data
◦States
◦Rules
◦Interfaces
◦User acceptance tests
Agile requirements and delivering:

Think of sashimi when delivering – Small clean units, bite sized requirements that are as fresh as possible. Delivered immediately and consumed. – Really like this analogy!

Inspect and adapt:

◦The goal is to learn what went well but also adapt and improve as we go forward.
Requirements development & management:

◦Elicit
◦Analyze
◦Specify
◦Validate

In summary, we need smart documentation. Doing smaller chunks of work and working closely with the Product Owner and being ok with incompleteness in total requirements. During the release the requirements are done in full.

So, do we have an oxymoron when it comes to Agile requirements? No way!

Originally posted by www.agilescout.com

Manoj Vadakkan Video Interview PWWCBA

"originally posted on agilescout.com"

Pam Stanton PWWCBA Skype Conversations

Learn more about this event by visiting Projectworld 2010 or signing up for the newsletter: Newsletter

"these interviews were originally posted on www.agilescout.com"

Ellen Gottesdiener - Agile Retrospectives

[This article was originally published at AgileScout.com. You can find them on Twitter at @agilescout]

A retrospective is a ritual in which the project community:

Reviews the iteration/release/project story

Harvests the collective wisdom of the team

Tells the truth without blame or judgment

Identifies what to appreciate and improve

Understand and forgives its failings

Relishes in its successes

"The insights gained from the retrospectives are the basis for starting again."

What do we ask during a retrospective:

What did we do well that we might forget to do next time if we don't discuss it?

What did we learn?

What should we do differently next time?

What still puzzles us?

What needs more discussion?

Retrospectives need to have structure to them, but also flexibility to move and respond to changes:

Readying - Set the stage

Past - Gather data

Present - Generate insights

Future - Decide what to do

Retrospect - Close the retrospective

In retrospective of this talk, Ellen did a great job helping us understand a framework for holding a retrospective. To learn more about retrospectives you can visit Ellen's website at www.ebgconsulting.com.

James R. Lucas - Team Paradoxes

[This article was originally published at AgileScout.com. You can find them on Twitter at @agilescout]

"Working with people would be easy if it wasn't for the people."

"Competing ideas are not a problem to be solved. Competing ideas are an opportunity to be exploited."

The paradox management process:

Embrace - determine to fully accept and live both sides of the paradox. Take more risk and eliminate risk

Eliminate - Focus on identifying and ridding ourselves of weak, poor, and suboptimal ideas and actions on each side of the paradox. Centralize or de-centralize?

Enhance - Focus on identifying and optimizing the good, value-add ideas and actions on each side of the paradox. Have war-rooms and party-rooms. Give people margin to think!

Engage - Use innovation to consciously and systematically to merge the two sides of the paradox into a cohesive whole. Evaluate ideas.

Explore - Challenge the status quo by identifying new actions that grow out of the merger of the two ideas. Be consistent and change everything.

In summary, James reveals to us the need to embrace the whole picture. Paradoxes shouldn't be avoided, they should be embraced!

Arthur Shelley - Behaviors and Teams

[This article was originally published at AgileScout.com]

"I'm the behavioral story guy. We must have conversations around behaviors in regard to projects."

"Just because you're at the top of an org chart doesn't mean you're the leader."

What animal do we need to be in business? How do we act?

Behavior drives performance:

Performance = Capability + motivation + influence + role

In summary, do you understand your cultural jungle of characters? Now you need to create an environment that connects with the stakeholders in effective manners. Don't align a lion with a mouse, but communicate wisely. Also, understand your teams social network. If you understand who talks with whom, you'll understand where influence lies.

All behaviors have a niche:

◦Not right and wrong behaviors – But there are misplaced behaviors
◦Target right animal in the right context – To get the optimal outcome
◦Change animals consciously and proactively – rather than subconsciously in reaction
“Need to show that you are behaviorally adaptable in business so as to not be mis-characterized.”

Arthur’s slides are below:

Mary Gerush - Next Gen Project Managers

[This article was originally published at AgileScout.com.]

"It's time to paint a new picture of the IT project manager."

Traditional project management has helped us build our world and these standards are entrenched in our IT culture. Today's project manager is skilled, trained, certified.

But are we successful? Data suggests the answer is "NO."

Project managers need to prioritize differently now.

Teams have changed in this brave new world:

Distributed globally

Culturally diverse

Multi-sourced

Cross-functional

Business and technology complexity is growing in this new world:

Mergers and acquisitions

Partnerships

Compliance

Diverse architecture

Integrations and legacy

New technologies (Cloud, open source, mobility, Web 2.0, social media)

In summary, the new project manager needs to hone their people skills and adapt to new technologies. The soft skills that a project manager has is absolutely crucial to the success of project managers in the new technology-driven world.