Professional Development Day

Exploring for Excellence!

The theme for this one day event is “Exploring for Excellence”.  The keynote speaker is Pat Johns, President and CEO PFJ Communications in Dallas, TX.   Mr. Johns is an expert motivator, business leader, author, photographer, keynote presenter, corporate trainer, leadership expert and expert athlete.  He is a contributing editor for Best Practices Magazine, and his photos and articles are published internationally in an array of magazines. Mr. Johns is a frequent TV and talk-radio guest and has produced programming for NPR affiliate KERA.  He was recently featured on Fox News as an authority on perseverance.  Mr. Johns has competed in over 60 ultra marathons and marathons worldwide. His sport: “endurance trail running." Upon completing the 2005 Himalayan 100, Mr. Johns is the only person to finish the high-altitude 100 mile running race on the India-Nepal borders four times.

Tarrant County College is graciously hosting the event at their Trinity Campus, downtown Fort Worth. 

This event will be open to both chapter members and the public with advance registration only.

Attendees will have the opportunity to network with colleagues and speakers, and interact with event sponsors about their products and services. 

Agenda:

7:00am - 8:00am 
Registration / Continental Breakfast / Networking

8:00am – 9:30am 
Opening: Fort Worth Chapter PMI and Tarrant County College
Keynote: Pat Johns – Exploring for Excellence: Footprints in the Shadow of Giants

9:30am - 11:00am
Session 01: Cynthia Hodgkins: Managing Virtual Teams Half a World Away
Session 02: Tom Sheives - Surviving Earthquakes: Your Unshakeable Personal Foundation as a Project Manager
Session 03: Nikki Choyce - When Technical Knowledge Isn’t Enough
Session 04: Tony Johnson - Evolving Your Skills From Project To Program Management
Session 05: Gary Rechtfertig - Risk Management: Your Greatest Challenges

11:00am - 11:15am
Morning Break

11:15am - 12:45pm 
Session 06: Pat Johns - X-Treme Brain Exploring for a Stronger Mind “Grey Matters!”
Session 07: Bill Duncan - Why Your Team Won’t Plan
Session 08: Rick Morris - Making Emotional Conversations Unemotional
Session 09: George Pitagorsky - PM Competency Management for Individuals and Organizations
Session 10: Chuck Tryon – Understanding Business Requirements

12:45pm - 1:30pm
Lunch

1:30pm - 3:00pm 
Session 11: Tresia Eaves: Leading in Times of Change and Maybe Turmoil!
Session 12: Tom Sheives - Applying Organizational Project Management in Your Company
Session 13: Nikki Choyce - Herding Cats (AKA “Managing a Project Team”)
Session 14: Tony Johnson - Attacking The Iceberg – Agile Program Management
Session 15: Gary Rechtfertig - Emotional Intelligence – Trauma in the Workplace

3:00pm - 3:15pm
Afternoon break

3:15pm - 4:45pm
Session 16: Pat Johns - Access
Session 17: Bill Duncan - The Future of Project Management
Session 18: Rick Morris - Stop Playing Games
Session 19: George Pitagorsky - Conflict Management: Applying Mindfulness and Dialogue to Achieve Win-Win Results
Session 20: Chuck Tryon – Great Ideas! Capturing Inspired Thought to Dramatically Improve Your Organization

4:45pm - 5:45pm 
Vendor Showcase & Door Prizes

Pricing

* Early Bird discount expires May 7, 2010.

Sessions are assigned on a first-come, first-served basis for paid registrations. Register today for best selection !

Last Registration May 14th.  Walk-ins will not be accepted.

PDUs

Attendees will have the opportunity to learn about a wide variety of project management topics while being able to obtain up to 8 PDUs towards PMI Continuing Education requirements.

Session Information

Keynote Address – Pat Johns – Exploring for Excellence: Footprints in the Shadow of Giants
Pat Johns will reveal secrets he learned from the world's top endurance athletes: those who participate in the grueling Himalayan 100 Mile Running Race.  Pat's investigation into the psychology and motivation of this small group of elite athletes has yielded a unique understanding of the common core values of these diverse competitors.  He translates this experience to business and life through the 5C’s - Comfort Zone, Commitment, Connections, Common Sense and Compassion. It's not about running - it's about living - It's about how we change when we do difficult things!

Session 01: Cynthia Hodgkins: Managing Virtual Teams Half a World Away
Managing a virtual team that consists of persons located in the continental United States, or even in NAFTA countries is challenging, even for experienced project managers. Being a project manager who manages a virtual team in another part of the world, dealing with a dramatically different culture is even more difficult. This presentation will cover the basic of managing a virtual team, cover the tips and tricks that every project manager should know about virtual teams and discuss the pitfalls that most managers experience on their own before they understand how to manage the virtual team.  This workshop will help you discover practical strategies designed to cope with virtual team and cultural challenges and to take positive steps to propel your team toward better performance.

Session 02: Tom Sheives - Surviving Earthquakes: Your Unshakeable Personal Foundation as a Project Manager
Psychologists and coaches have shown over and over that successful leaders over the long haul have something different around them.  They have a strong emotional health, positive outlook, good physical environment, good personal relationships, strong financial support system, and great professional goals.  With the challenges that this new economy provides, project managers are doing more with less, doing more for less money, and being pulled in multiple directions by sponsors, functional managers, and yes, even families. This presentation will help motivate project managers to examine their own world and decide how much work they need to survive and succeed in the presence of the tremors and earthquakes of change in their own jobs and job transitions.

Session 03: Nikki Choyce - When Technical Knowledge Isn’t Enough
Knowing isn’t the same as doing, and having a wealth of technical knowledge isn’t enough to guarantee project success.  There are specific skills each of us must hone to become great project managers.  Surprisingly, they have very little to do with project management and everything to do with people.  Maximize your effectiveness by gaining a better understanding of your own project roles such as facilitator, decision maker and motivator and the skills, tools and techniques associated with them.

Session 04: Tony Johnson - Evolving Your Skills From Project To Program Management
As a project manager’s career grows, program management will be a common path as the work grows more complex. The project manager can learn to be more effective by applying program management principles as their work gets bigger and more complex. Learn about how to take your career and results to the next level by applying program management skills. Included are enhanced views on resource management, work decomposition, transition and interface planning as well as program governance.

Session 05: Gary Rechtfertig - Risk Management: Your Greatest Challenges
This presentation will address the following key questions concerning RISK: 1) What is RISK and how do you manage it? 2) What are Risk Types and Factors involved in Risk Management? 3) What are Inputs to Risk evaluation? 4) Steps for Risk Management Planning. 5) Objectives of Risk Identification 6) Qualitative and Quantitative Risk Analysis. 7) Risk Response Planning and 8) Risk Monitoring and Control.

Session 06: Pat Johns - X-Treme Brain Exploring for a Stronger Mind “Grey Matters!”
Take a journey to a place of better understanding of the role of the brain and the mind.  Look at new ways of learning, new ways of thinking and the basic nature of motivation and change. Enjoy visualization exercises and a demonstration of brain balancing techniques.

Session 07: Bill Duncan - Why Your Team Won’t Plan
It’s an article of faith within the discipline of project management that good planning is important to success. We constantly quote pithy aphorisms such as “failing to plan is planning to fail” and “proper project planning prevents pathetically poor performance.” Yet the fact remains that many projects still suffer from inadequate planning. In this presentation we’ll discuss three obvious reasons that teams don’t plan and how they obscure the three real reasons.

Session 08: Rick Morris - Making Emotional Conversations Unemotional
Project managers are routinely faced with sponsors mandating unreachable dates, teams unable to give reliable estimates, changing priorities and scope, and a myriad of other issues.  This session will outline how to take these emotionally charged situations and turn them into unemotional conversations.  This is a simple, time-tested, experience based method to communicate with the entire project team from stakeholders to team members. 

Session 09: George Pitagorsky - PM Competency Management for Individuals and Organizations
Competency is the ability to perform.  It “encompasses the skills, knowledge, attitudes and behaviors that are causally related to superior job performance.  Competency is evidenced by observed performance.  In this presentation we will explore the principle competencies required by a project manager and how as an individual and organization one can take the responsibility to assess and cultivate the competencies one needs to excel.   We will explore 360° assessment, performance measurement and learning and development as key aspects of competency management.

Session 10: Chuck Tryon – Understanding Business Requirements
One of the first challenges for many newly launched projects is to capture a set of business requirements to feed into a product design processes.  This is especially true for reengineering, software development, outsourcing or package selection initiatives.  Unfortunately, this activity is often so poorly understood that it becomes a nebulous search for undefined matter.  Before we can understand the business requirements on a project, it is vital that we first create a common understanding of what ARE business requirements.  This presentation provides a requirements framework that distinguishes between essential policies and rules, the apex of business requirements, and solution characteristics that describe five various elements of an intended solution.  Each type of business requirement is defined and their relationship in a requirements management process is explained.  The presentation concludes with specific factors that will help both a project and the total organization be more successful “understanding business requirements.”

Session 11: Tresia Eaves: Leading in Times of Change and Maybe Turmoil!
Have you ever seen a leader elegantly and flawlessly lead a group through what seems to be an impossible time period or challenge?  Have you wondered how they are able to achieve success with what seems to be insurmountable odds?  This session addresses secrets to leading projects and high performance teams through the turbulent changes in our business environments today and provides some practical, easy to implement tools that you can walk away with and apply in your work center the next day!  Some of these ideas involve how you organize yourself and your team, how to successfully delegate work and carefully track progress on tasks through your schedule, how she’s implemented an Earned Value Management System, how to mentor your future leaders, and finally, and some leadership techniques.

Session 12: Tom Sheives - Applying Organizational Project Management in Your Company
This presentation presents proven, cutting edge methods to improve project management in your own company using concepts from PMI’s OPM3 and other company organizational project management techniques.  This course is not about the mechanics of project management but more about 1) the business processes that surround project management in an organization that will ensure that project management is being used to its full effectiveness in the organization and 2) using a road map for organizational change management as specifically related to project management within the organization.

Session 13: Nikki Choyce - Herding Cats (AKA “Managing a Project Team”)
Project teams are different than other types of teams and the same rules don’t apply.  In this session, we will explore what makes a project team so different, factors that determine the team structure and interactions, team development phases and the observable behaviors of each, and situational leadership styles for different types of teams.  By understanding the challenges and correctly identifying the issues, you will have the ability to adopt specific actions designed to create a highly functional team.

Session 14: Tony Johnson - Attacking The Iceberg – Agile Program Management
Project and program management grow more challenging every day. Bigger projects, more complex functionality and
features, resource conflict, resources supporting operations, daily changing priorities -- what is next? We hear that program management is a hot evolving topic. We hear that agile or iterative approaches to product development help make the work more manageable. Program management focuses on viewing work at a higher level. Agile development focuses on breaking things into smaller manageable pieces. Learn what to do to blend the two and benefit from both approaches. Learn about what to do to improve the likelihood of project success and team member satisfaction.

Session 15: Gary Rechtfertig - Emotional Intelligence – Trauma in the Workplace
There is a lot of discussion today on many aspects about “Project Management” but not much discussion on the Project Manager. Could our trauma be the result of our work environment?  Or is it imported from our personal lives outside the workplace?  How does Emotional Intelligence help us work with Trauma in our life and help us work with co workers experiencing trauma in their lives? This session addresses how we can handle trauma inside or outside of the workplace.

Session 16: Pat Johns – Access
How does Pat Johns manage to get his incredible pictures with the local indigenous people in far-away lands?  It's about Access.  We are all indigenous to our own culture. See how utilizing the same techniques that Pat employs to gain trust with the amazing people he photographs, translates in an entertaining, powerful and extraordinarily colorful way to better business practices.  Pat Johns will demonstrate how you too, can gain ACCESS to win in staff-management relations, customer relations and other relationships critical to success.

Session 17: Bill Duncan - The Future of Project Management
Most prognosticators predict the future by extending current trends. Project management prognosticators are no different — they suggest that the profession will continue to grow along the same lines and at the same rate that it has been growing. But in every other field, discontinuities always intervene. Why should project management be different? In this presentation, we'll take a look at the current state of professionalism in project management, then review some alternative -- but no less probable -- scenarios for the future.

Session 18: Rick Morris – Stop Playing Games
Project Managers have the unique ability to find shortcuts or work-arounds in dealing with projects, sponsors, etc… Mr. Morris will provide project managers valuable tips on how to avoid playing games and get more respect for the work they do.  Project managers will gain techniques that can be use immediately, as well as learn how to influence without authority.

Session 19: George Pitagorsky - Conflict Management: Applying Mindfulness to Achieve Win-Win Results
This presentation addresses the critical behavioral skill of conflict management.  It defines the difference between the useful conflict around content and the destructive conflict arising from personality differences and emotional attachment to ones beliefs, even in the face of objective evidence to the contrary.  We offer specific techniques for managing conflict so that the outcome is a win for the individuals involved and the project as a whole. 

Session 20: Chuck Tryon – Great Ideas! Capturing Inspired Thought to Dramatically Improve Your Organization
People of all levels see needs that should be resolved.  Some of these needs simply require a management decision while others demand the focus and resources of a formal project.  Great Ideas! is far more than a suggestion box.  It is a proven program that equips people to take their ideas and refine them into a formal proposal that triggers management attention and action.  The concept provides employees with a vehicle to communicate answers to real problems or opportunities.  It gives senior management a source of new possibilities that would otherwise not be heard.

Presenter Information

Pat Johns, President and CEO PFJ Communications
Mr. Johns is an expert motivator, business leader, author, photographer, keynote presenter, corporate trainer, leadership expert and expert athlete.  He is a contributing editor for Best Practices Magazine, and his photos and articles are published internationally in an array of magazines. Mr. Johns is a frequent TV and talk-radio guest and has produced programming for NPR affiliate KERA.  He was recently featured on Fox News as an authority on perseverance.  Mr. Johns has competed in over 60 ultra marathons and marathons worldwide. His sport: “endurance trail running." Upon completing the 2005 Himalayan 100, Mr. Johns is the only person to finish the high-altitude 100 mile running race on the India-Nepal borders four times.

William Duncan, Project Management Partners
William R. Duncan is a principal of Project Management Partners, a project management consulting and training firm. He is the former Director of Standards for the Project Management Institute, Inc. (USA) and is currently Director of Standards for the American Society for Advancement of Project Management (asapm).  Mr. Duncan was the primary author of the 1994 and 1996 versions of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, the most widely used project management standard in the world. In addition, his "process model" of project management was used to organize both ISO 10006, Guidelines for quality in project management.

Rick Morris, President/Owner of R2 Consulting
Rick Morris is an ITIL Practitioner, consultant, author, mentor, and creator of a non-profit foundation to promote Project Management in charities and other non-profits. Mr. Morris holds PMP (Project Management Professional), MPM (Masters of Project Management), OPM3 (Organization Project Management Maturity Model), Six Sigma Green Belt, MCITP, MCTS, MCSE, TQM, ATM-S, ITIL, and ISO certifications. He has authored two books: “The Everything Project Management Book” and “Project Management That Works!” and is currently the President of the Birmingham Chapter of the project Management Institute.

Chuck Tryon, Tryon Associates
Chuck Tryon is a nationally respected educator and popular symposium speaker.  He founded Tryon and Associates in 1986 to provide seminar training and consulting that helps organizations and individuals develop predictable and repeatable approaches to modern project management, knowledge management and business requirements.  The strategies presented in Mr. Tryon’s seminars are used by thousands of professionals in hundreds of organizations across the United States, Europe and Canada.  His client list includes many top 100 companies.

George Pitagorsky, Pitagorsky Consulting
George Pitagorsky, PMP, is a skilled and engaging speaker who stimulates creative thinking.  He has extensive experience in project management and consulting, as well as teaching mindfulness meditation, systems thinking, project management and performance improvement.  He created and led the Organizational Competency Management workshop for global participants.  He has also been a key player and product director in the development of a PM Competency Model and a PM methodology and PM curricula for a global PM education firm.  He is the author of Conflict Management in Projects being released in early 2011 and the Zen Approach to Project Management.

Nikki Choyce, Infotech Management
Nikki Choyce is a highly skilled project management consultant; instructor and coach with over twelve years of experience helping individuals and companies improve project performance and personal effectiveness by applying improved processes and practical project management.  Her company, Infotech Management, has provided training and project management consulting services for almost twenty years.  She is a Project Management Professional and received her coach training from an accredited International Coach Federation (ICF) organization. Ms Choyce has authored or co-authored over 25 project management training courses as well as three on-line courses, and is an active officer of the Fort Worth PMI chapter currently serving as Vice President of Programs.

Tom Sheives, True Solutions
Tom Sheives is the Executive Director, Business Development with True Solutions, Inc.  He is a consultant, author, speaker and coach.  His mission is to “Get Project Teams and Management Teams unstuck!” His book OPPORTUNITY unstuck!  describes key principles discovered from his recent experience in training over 175 executives with the Panama Canal Authority.  He has written and delivered training for PMP® certification, PM Fundamentals, Requirements Development, Leadership and Teaming and has launched an exciting, new OPPORTUNITY unstuck! workshop.  Mr. Sheives is on the faculty of the University of Texas at Dallas.

Gary Rechtfertig, Doulos Project Management Training
Gary Rechtfertig, founder of Doulos Project Management Training, is a 41 year veteran in the IT Management and Project Management industry. He has spoken at a National level on Project Management and Risk Management and has been an instructor in Project Management at the University of Texas – Arlington.  He is currently a lecturer on Project Management and Emotional Intelligence at the University of Northern Texas and Northwood University.  He is also the Lead Instructor at Doulos and instructs a wide variety of project management courses. 

Tony Johnson, Crosswind Project Management
Tony Johnson, MBA, PMP, President and Founder of Crosswind Project Management Inc. has over 20 years of experience as a project and program.  Mr. Johnson has delivered over 9000 hours of project management training in alignment with PMI® Standards and has contributed toward the most recently released PMI® Standards.  He has specifically contributed toward the PMBOK® Guide – Fourth Edition, the Standard for Program Management – Second Edition, the Standard for Portfolio Management – Second Edition, and the OPM3 Knowledge Foundation – Second Edition.

Cynthia Hodgkins, True Solutions, Inc.
Cynthia Hodgkins, PMP, Senior Practice Manager with True Solutions, Inc., is a consultant, speaker and coach.  Her goal is to provide the Ultimate project management training and services experience for clients worldwide.  Cynthia has helped organizations like Saudi Telecom, Florida Hospital, the University of Texas at Austin, and others to perform project management more efficiently and effectively. 

Tresia Eaves, SENTEL
Tresia Eaves, Vice President of SENTEL’s Technology Integration Group, specializes in the creation and implementation of highly successful life cycle processes for software, hardware, services development, testing, quality assurance, and project management functions.  She has provided leadership, expertise, and coaching for more than 80 projects and coached and motivated teams in various private industries and for the government.  She is currently the Vice President of SENTEL’s Technology Integration Group and the Program Manager for SENTEL’s contract with the IRS delivering a suite of programs called Report Generation Software which allows more than 26,000 revenue agents to perform their mission each tax year.