International Project Management (I.P.M.) Day – the first Thursday of November each year – was celebrated on 6 November this year. This day has been set aside to recognize project management as a profession and project managers as practitioners.

At Alcatel-Lucent USA, an online symposium was organized that day to share knowledge among practitioners with presenters from both within the company and outside. The theme for the 8th Annual IPM Day Symposium was "Projects lead the way".

J. J.L. Hospital, vice president, Alcatel-Lucent Customer Program Management Operations, was the keynote speaker. The other key speakers were Mr. Chris Kindermans, managing partner, Kindermans Van Langenhove; Ms. Kimberly Wiefling, author of the “Scrappy” series of books for project managers and leaders; Mr. Alexander Worm, PMO leader, processes, and tools, Alcatel-Lucent; Mr. Menno Valkenburg, PMP, leader, Ten Step NL Consulting Group; Ms. Barbara Trautlein, PhD, author of Change Leadership; Ms. Cynthia Scott, PhD, core instructor and faculty director, Presidio Graduate School; Ms. Tina Martinek, vice president, Alcatel-Lucent Program Management; Mr. Cesar Abeid, PMI director, Western Ontario, podcaster, and social media expert; Mr. Vineet Chandra, senior quality manager, Alcatel-Lucent India; and Mr. Shine Sahadevan, head - organization markets, PMI India.

This year Alcatel-Lucent followed a different approach. Instead of a live event, each speaker was interviewed by a "speaker mentor" from PM-CERT, which is the adhoc team that plans and executes this event. Participants needed to register to watch the web event. With this format, practitioners across geographies from Australia to the Americas could take part.

 

Over 1000 project management professionals attended the event within a week. The webcast will be available in Alcatel-Lucent University for the next three years to enable more practitioners to benefit from the knowledge shared and earn professional development units (PDUs). The entire program entitles practitioners to 7.5 PDUs.