Forum to Foster Sharing

PMI Bangalore Chapter, one of the largest chapters in the Asiapac region, conducts a fortnightly forum, PM Footprints. PM Footprints is a knowledge and experience sharing platform for project management practitioners across industry verticals. It is held every alternate Thursday and is well-attended by practitioners. Between January and March 2009, six such sessions were organized on a variety of subjects.

January 8: Energizing Project Teams for Productivity Enhancement

Sudipto Chand from Extreme Productivity discussed his experiences on how energizing the individual and team as a whole helped increase productivity of the team. He presented his views of the role of a project manager from a people management perspective and the Jack Welch perspective. He discussed about various challenges in energizing the team and how one can overcome those challenges. He covered topics like, conflict management, team identity and understanding of group dynamics.

January 22: Managing New Product Development and Introduction (NPDI) process

Harikumar B. from Samsung shared his experiences from the perspective of an electronic industry. He emphasized the need for a process in an organization while developing and delivering new products to the market at an increasingly fast pace. Harikumar spoke about NPDI and the processes that can improve it. He discussed success and differentiation strategies and metrics and best practices of NPDI.

February 5: Project Management – Engaging with Japanese Clients

Satishkumar Shankarnarayanan from Oracle shared his and his colleagues’ experiences in managing projects in Japan, its culture, communication styles and execution methods. He discussed how Japanese invest more time in planning for the smooth execution of a project. He also discussed about how transparency and trust, discipline and dedication, facts and data and quality are critical success factors in Japanese projects.

February 19: Business and Project Management Aspects in Cloud Technologies

Satheesan Varier from OSRDG highlighted some of the most relevant aspects of cloud computing technologies and how it helps provide a technical solution for a business requirement of an organization. Satheesan said project managers should be aware of how a product is built for the project to be successful.

March 5: Successful IT Project Management in the Middle East Region

Chidambara Ganapaiah from Oracle threw light on the factors that play a crucial role in executing a project in the Middle East. He talked about how being familiar on what works and what does not helped him being successful in executing projects. This session focused on providing some essential insights to project managers working with Middle East clients, especially those on the offshore-onsite model.

March 19: SAP ERP – Functional Evaluation Against PMI Framework

Rajkumar R. from Brigade Enterprises shared his experiences of evaluating the functional capabilities of the SAP ERP product to implement and support PMI processes in the real estate and construction verticals. He delved on how structured evaluation helped identify customization of the product to facilitate project management processes.