PMI India Senior Champions Abhishek Sharma and Gitika Sinha from Cisco Systems organized the third annual Project Management Day at Cisco, under the banner of the project management community, PM Connect. The event on 23 July brought together practising project managers and aspirants from different business units for a great learning opportunity.

The day started with a PM Poster session in which different teams - Customer Experience, Engineering, IT, and HR - showcased their best projects.

For the first time, it included Cisco’s Employee Resource Organization that focused a poster on disability awareness. The poster covered its initiatives aimed at working together for the benefit of the community.

Post-lunch, the main event saw a full house with over 300 attendees. V C Gopal, senior vice president, CIO, and chief executive sponsor of PM Connect, kicked off the session. It was followed by a panel discussion with leaders from cross-functional teams on the value that project managers add to Cisco’s business. One of the key messages that emerged was the capabilities of a project manager to become more of a leader than just a manager by spearheading excellence in the way projects are executed at Cisco.

For the PM Role Model Series, Jake Chander from Philips Healthcare spoke about his journey from a software engineer to a project manager. The event concluded with a presentation by Anees Haidary from Sasken on PMI’s Project Management Competency Development Framework and its benefits.