Archive for November, 2019

PM Unconference

November 13, 2019

I attended a conference last week, on Friday and Saturday. The topic was about project management in general and it was held in Szeged, Hungary, the city where I work. Something like 30-40 professionals got together to discuss about various aspects of PM.

What was particular about this event is that it was an unconference. As the BarCamp concept describes, it is an

open, participatory workshop-events, the content of which is provided by participants

Which means we just got together, we were explained “how the game is played” and got immediately a shot:

  • Participants wrote the topic of their interest on a sticker, whether they wanted to give a brief presentation or, on the contrary, wanted to hear other people’s opinion
  • Introduced themselves and put the sticker on the white board
  • The white board had 3 rooms where the various sessions could be organized, sometimes we optimized if we saw some conflicts between them.

And that’s it! We had like 45 minutes time slots with 10 minutes breaks in between and then … go ahead! The audience was really mixed, from practicing PMs to folks who may once become a PM. We had a “special” guest as well, i.e. a lady from non-IT: she’s leading a local restaurant. It was really eye-opening how much similarity we have between these two professions.

What I liked very much is the pure interactive nature of the discussions, they were very lively. Since no-one could really prepare for their presentations, there were no formal PPTs or PDFs to present, thus presenters either just talked or also drew on the white board. The audience could and was encouraged to ask any questions during the presentations, which really made it a bi-directional conversation.

The topics were really diverse, just to pick up only a few

  • How to start a project
  • Agile transformation
  • How to motivate people and how to help them grow
  • Automation of management tasks
  • What to measure: performance or working hours
  • Company transformation from a start-up
  • ROI for employees vs sub-contractors
  • etc.

I think everyone was very satisfied at the end of the event, which was confirmed by their feedback on our quick retrospective.

Thanks for the organization, looking forward to the next conference next year!

Best,

Gabor

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