PM Point of View

No Luddites here! Episode 3 of the UMD PM Symposium prequal and guests Al Zeiton, Marissa Brienza and Bill Brantley chat about the role of AI in Project Management and the potential risks and benefits of using it as PMs. We discover the logic and importance of maintaining human interaction—turns out its not fear that makes us think “it will never replace us” but rather AI’s limitations in the larger PM discipline. Ah! But what potential magic AI may bring if we use it as augmenting project management, driving improved risk assessment, and being our outsourced memory! All in service of PMS providing value for customers, and keeping us on the relationship side, even as technology might give us augmented memory, augmented intelligence or even artificial emotional intelligence. There may be guardrails we need to learn as we plunge toward a future of exponential skill growth in which could take PMs to the CEO suite…but augmented PMs maybe the stuff CEOs will be made of!

Direct download: UMD_PM_4.0_AI__Future_for_Project_Managers.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:18pm EDT

We all talk Agile, and sometimes we "say we wanna do agile", so this conversation is about the challenges of implementing Agile in different environments with guests David Forsyth, Mike Mellane, and Caitlin Kenny.  Co-host Mike Hannan takes our experts through a journey of the tensions between customers and vendors and the difficulty in managing communication pathways, budgeting, and the principle-agent problem. Solutions you care about included dedicating teams, synchronizing resources, capacity-based budgeting, and fixed-price contracts. Ah, and culture, it always is culture...that the shift that comes with embracing Agile and how transformation should be a continuous journey that focuses on business value. So, with a little patience and a focus on interpersonal accountability, incentives, and autonomy you can build the trusting teams needed to do the Agile dance.  Fight the zealotry, power to the edge, and download the episode!

Direct download: So_you_wanna_Agile.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:39pm EDT

First, "do no harm"--seems like a good adage, and is consistent with our guest Kevin Coleman who discusses some tenets of his UMD PM Symposium presentation coming this April, called "Unconscious Bias: Recognize it and correct it." Our second critical conversations guest is John Hovell on his UMD presentation, "Conversational Leadership: Convening Conversations that Otherwise Wouldn't Happen" where grounded in Gestalt theory, he pushes us to develop conversations that affirmatively support ourselves and others. He asks us to consider, "are we creating community" when we interact. Our third guest, Paloma Martin lays out the underpinnings of our need to consider gender perspectives directly in our stakeholder engagement and across all of the PM processes, as she gives us the teaser for her presentation "Project and Change Management with a Gender Perspective." These speakers are three of the 50 you will hear at the UMD Project Management Center for Excellence 10th annual PM Symposium this April 20-21…if you register (pmsymposium.umd.edu). See you there, but stop by this episode first!
Direct download: Critical_Conversations.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:30am EDT

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