PM Insights Foster City - 

Design Thinking for
Sustainable Project Management

Project managers are magical beasts.  You tell them exactly what you want done, and they will make it happen.  But what happens when we want a better, more sustainable world, but we have no idea what our end state looks like?  We want to do the right thing, and we’re questioning long-standing assumptions.  How can we come up with a new approach, a new mindset, a new way of thinking to solve the problems it took decades to create?  We need to expand our toolset to create a more sustainable world.  In this session, we will learn the fundamentals of design thinking, and learn how to apply those to transform our way of thinking about project and portfolio management.

PM Insights Foster City - 

The Gig Economy and Freelance Project Management

The rise of the Gig economy is one of the most transformative global economic trends in the past decade.  In 2020, 59M Americans, or 36% of the U.S. workforce engaged in freelance work.  75% of freelancers who left an employer to pursue freelancing full-time report making the same or more income than when they worked a traditional job.  Freelancers contributed $1.2 trillion dollars to the U.S economy in annual earnings in 2020, a 22% increase since 2019.  The prevalence of freelance work as opposed to permanent jobs will continue to accelerate as more businesses transition to project-based frameworks in pursuit of organizational agility.   

The Gig economy, once thought to be a short-term fad, is here to stay.  But what exactly is the Gig Economy? And why should expert project management professionals, both full-time employees of an organization and independent consultants, understand this growing trend?   Are organizations embracing outsourced project managers? 

In this session, attendees will learn what the Gig economy is, what factors contributed to its rapid growth, and what project professionals can do today to stay ahead of the curve in our new world of work.

PM Insights Foster City - 

Storyboarding and Metrics
for Early Products

How do we determine the right set of features to build into an early product, prototype, or MVP? It’s important to make the decision based on quantitative and qualitative data, however in practice, it is often difficult to reconcile the two. In this talk, Nick will show you how he and his team at Kromatic have used Storyboarding to help product teams prioritize their builds, and determine which experiments to run.

PM Insights Foster City - 

Applicable Agile Frameworks

Project management requires a series of plans and processes from initiation to completion. Almost all processes use most (and probably not all) of the 49 processes outlined in PMI’s PMBOK. As project leaders, we use a series of assessments, gather requirements, align resources, and plan and oversee deliveries of milestones till we successfully finalize our projects. 

Since early 2001, Agile frameworks have become winning tools in hands of project organizational leaders. There are many Agile frameworks to develop and deliver products and services to customers. We will focus on Agile as mindset, and examine Agile frameworks that are successfully implemented. We will discuss a few hybrids of Agile frameworks where teams and organizations benefited from them.

PM Insights Foster City - 

How participatory decision-making brings

innovation to organizations

Without vulnerability there is no innovation, warns Brene Brown.  The practice of participatory decision making puts the right group of individuals together to make a decision, regardless of title.  This seemingly simple practice builds trust and engagement throughout the company, and unleashes a tremendous potential for innovation usually stymied by organizational hierarchies.  

A Marketplace Network organization, which incorporates participatory decision making, aligns teams with the customer and company purpose.  It is, however, not possible unless vulnerability is embraced and manifested in the organization’s culture. 

In this interactive workshop you will learn about this “future of work” approach, look at case studies, and discuss in small and large groups how it can empower you at any level of the organization.

PM Insights Foster City - 

Igniting Behavior Change Thru Technology

in the New Normal

The events of the past year have created a change in the competencies and behaviors necessary for professionals to succeed and is the starting point for a wider paradigm shift on how we train employees. More than 120 million workers in the world’s 12 largest economies need to be upskilled in the next 3 years. Micro-competencies like authenticity, vulnerability, inclusivity and agility will become even more important than functional experience or fancy academic degrees. Those competencies require learning delivery that involves more than rote memorization and digital quizzes.  In addition, technology exists now to address individual learning styles. In other words, technology can adjust to people rather than the other way around. We invite you to imagine, what if you could learn how to switch off unwanted behaviors or habits and become your ideal self with minimal effort? Although habit change has been nearly impossible historically, today, new developments in AI and technology are making it possible for learning to adapt individuals’ behaviors, making learning both fun and creative.  We invite you to join us and explore how ‘real time’ learning through technology support and just in time messaging is replacing traditional classroom training.

PM Insights Foster City - 

Overcoming Executive Inaction – Using the
Cost of Decision Latency to Reverse Analysis
Paralysis

According to the highly respected CHAOS Report, released every two years by the Standish Group, delays between questions and answers drive huge, negative impacts into project outcomes. It is counter-intuitive but the value of a shorter decision-making time-interval is greater than the value of a higher-quality decision. In Lean, and therefore Agile, this is recognized by the pairing of two concepts – Deferred Commitments and Last Responsible Moment.

Every PM knows methods and tools alone – even great ones like Lean, Project Management and Agile – cannot reduce those costs unless senior decision-makers make timely decisions and take action.

During this reality-based, technically-sophisticated webinar you will learn how to quantify the cost of decision-making delays and gain insights to demonstrate the pragmatic steps your leaders must take to avoid what management guru Peter Drucker summarized as, “Culture eats Vision for Lunch!”

PM Insights Foster City - 

Easy Estimation

“How long will that take?” A simple question, yet one of the hardest to answer. Traditional estimation fails because it takes the wrong approach to solve the wrong problem. We will uncover how and why relative estimation leads to better predictability. You will learn and practice the Easy Estimation With Story Points technique. This provides better predictability while spending less time estimating.

PM Insights Foster City - 

Managing Projects with Risk Up Front

We are all familiar with the artifacts of project management: goals, product backlogs, schedules, charts, risk lists, etc. As project managers, we are trained to use these tools on projects, with the understanding that they increase the likelihood that our projects will be successful. But many, perhaps most of us, have seen projects fail even as project management "best practices" were humming along. The schedule on the wall does not match the reality of what is being done, the chart tells management about what has happened, but not whether the project is in trouble, and the risk list sits in a drawer, only to be pulled out afterward to explain convincingly why the project failed.

What if, instead, we begin by actively engaging with the reasons our project might fail and then use that insight to determine what we need from a schedule and which activities should be moved to the project's front. This talk will explore the relationship between commitment and risk identification, the cost of being late, and the role of language in creating committed teams that deliver faster and more reliably.

PM Insights Foster City - 

Networking for Career Success:

Leveraging a Hi-Touch Approach in a Hi-Tech Valley

We all know networking is key for career advancement and for fast, effective job searches, but are you doing it as well as you could be? Come and find out how to bring your networking to a whole new level!