PM Insight Sunnyvale

Learning how to market yourself and grow your professional brand is essential in today’s business climate.  Are you someone who is passionate about continuous self-improvement and eager to learn new frameworks and techniques to better optimize your time to conduct your job search and enhance your LinkedIn profile?  

This practical and informative session will provide tips on how to focus your time to build a better brand along with tips on how LinkedIn can help you promote your expertise.

This session will be beneficial for people who are seasoned professionals and intermediate-level LinkedIn users looking for competitive edges to boost their visibility on the platform.

CHAPTER ANNUAL BUSINESS MEETING:
It is traditional that our Chapter will hold a short Annual Business Meeting at the beginning of the December event. Please note that the first 15 minutes of this webinar is dedicated to our Chapter President to present our 2021 annual business report and announcements.
Our Insight event speaker, Sai Subramanian, will start his webinar in the same Zoom meeting session immediately following the Annual Meeting.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is delivering new insights − previously hidden in vast pools of data − to add intelligence to many products and services that ultimately transform the way organizations and machines interact. AI can improve the productivity of internal applications, increase revenue, reduce costs, and improve products and services with added functionality or communication modes. With such a wide-ranging application, enterprises also are struggling to understand what this means to them, how to go about identifying the key areas of benefits, and the modus operandi of going about it technically and culturally. One key to success lies in deciding what problems to solve and identifying a narrowly defined problem that is widely acknowledged within the organization as a pain point. The project should be practical, with adequate funding and access to data. From here on identifying the right tools, talent and methodology can set you on the right path. Also, Data analytics initiatives usually lead to significant changes in the organization’s procedures and culture. Acknowledging and accommodating for this early is imperative. All this, though, does not have to be overwhelming and daunting for the execution leader. This can be broken down into simple to steps to approach, assess, align and achieve.

Failing fast is fine.  Failing forward is truly part of a generative mindset.  Safe-Fail environments create the learning cycles needed to succeed by supporting psychological safety.  But is it possible to succeed sooner?  With the Disciplined Agile Toolkit, the answer may be yes.  Come to this session to learn about the tools available for new Scrum Masters, Experienced Scrum Masters, and Coaches.  Come work with the toolkit in Safe-Fail Zoom Breakouts and get on the pathway to be an Alpha Coach. This is an interactive course using the Miro online tool.  A full personal computer with a second screen is ideal for participants.

This session will address why companies use ERP solutions – what are the typical use cases and types of implementations which are common. ERP can be a driver of change, digital transformation, optimization, can support back-office functions and is undergoing substantial technical transformation with adoption of cloud SaaS solutions. 

Given these use cases, we will discuss methods of implementation based on the scenario. Waterfall may suite some uses, agile for others, continuous build in others. We will review key project management structures such as a PMO, PMO as a Service, Portfolio management, best practice PMO capabilities and PM accelerators. We will address best practices roadmap and assessment approaches to define the implementation scope.

We influence without authority by mastering in #Storytelling and #StoryListening.

Two killing Strategic Project Management Skills we all know and most of us haven’t paid enough attention to them in project management are storytelling and storylistening. When was the last time you delivered a compelling story to shift a challenging conversation to consensus? Through 7 years of actively participating with Toastmasters, I have experienced the power of storytelling and storylistening. In 2018, I experienced a major roadblock for a +7-million-dollar Fiber optics project due to the Park and Wildlife Code Chapter 26 – Protection of Public Parks and Recreational Lands. One major story I missed to listening to carefully almost killed the project. As the project leader, I was glad to shift the roadblock and lift the spirit of the Team to a positive outcome.

Are you ready to sharpen your saw and advance your professional brand to the next level? Join me for this session to hear about the Power of Butterflies and my suggestion to sharpen your saw. You’ll also be invited to share your take on how we can do better to shift us from Project managers to Project leaders, from project leaders to project change makers. Let’s Influence without Authority together. When it comes to Storytelling and StoryListening, “Any fool can know; the point is to understand” – Albert Einstein.

We will discuss how Blockchain technology has been changing how humans transacted for thousand of years. For the first time, through the power of cryptography, we are able to eliminate the need to trust a third party to transact with other people and organizations. Some specific examples of how this innovation will shape the future of our civilization will be discussed. We will then dive deeper into the technical details of the Blockchain technology and issues that need to be overcome for the adoption of the technology. We will outline the work done at AMD to address some of these issues and accelerate the adaption of Blockchain technology.  

Have you ever lost sleep because of a difficult stakeholder? Maybe it was a boss, a peer, or someone on the other side of the business. Perhaps it was worry about having to deal with them in an upcoming meeting. Or ruminating about how they are an obstacle to progress on a project.

So much of our success in leading and directing projects comes down to our ability to influence our project stakeholders. Experience teaches us that managing their expectations and building rapport with our key stakeholders can make an enormous difference in our ability to successfully deliver. But the truth is some of our stakeholders are difficult. And though you can unfriend people on social media, you can't unfriend a stakeholder--you have to learn how to deal with them.

In this session, Andy Kaufman shares six strategies for dealing with difficult stakeholders. There are no simple answers but these are strategies that Andy has shared with clients around the world, and you're invited to see which ones you can put into place.

After all, you deserve a better night of sleep!

Many leaders are eagerly awaiting the “return to the office” but most organizations are trending towards hybrid co-located and distributed teams - and underestimating the challenges they are about to face. Despite now having experience with full co-location and fully remote operations, blending remote and in-person interactions is more complex than “averaging” the two extremes. Ensuring that your People and Processes will thrive in a hybrid state requires targeted planning. 

Fortunately, companies with satellite offices have been building best practices on hybrid operations for years pre-pandemic. There is plenty of opportunity for smaller teams and companies to stand on the shoulders of giants as they plan for, or dive into, this new way of working. Starting with concepts like “structured informality”, this is a talk about the potential contradictions of hybrid operations and how to leverage them to your best advantage.

Your team has so much work to do; where do you start?  This presentation will highlight several techniques that ensure your team can identify important work and refine it to readiness. You can then execute the work using your favorite technique (Scrum, Kanban, etc.).

We will discuss one definition of Business Value which will lead us into the Impact Mapping technique. Impact Mapping helps us identify what needs to happen to generate business value. We will then move to backlog creation and management techniques whish are essential pre-work to delivering the solution.

Attendees should come to this session with a target business in mind, several sheets of paper for the exercises and one sheet of scratch paper.

Most teams work too hard, experience too much conflict, friction, and stress, and vastly underachieve their potential.  This is because every team member is unknowingly sabotaging both their own and their team's performance and well-being.

We will explore how and why we each self-sabotage, and how to maximize both performance and well-being simultaneously by focusing on the root-level mental muscles that impact both.  Just like we build muscle through physical fitness, building these mental muscles with mental fitness is the X-factor to boost leadership performance.