Project Management Seminars, online and offline, Mar 2015

I joined a few seminars about project management this month. Two of them were organized by ProjectManagement.com which was acquired by PMI last Jan. ProjectManagement.com is a project management tool repository and community for project managers. They host many webinars to provide trainings to their members. Members can join webinar in realtime or watch the webinar recordings later. PDUs will be automatically reported to PMI in about a week time. They use Adobe Connect to conduct their webinars. Attendees around the world – from Hong Kong to New Delhi to Dubai to German to US – can chat and share ideas and opinions in realtime. The recordings are in MP4 format and can be viewed on PC. Hopefully iOS devices will be supported soon.
[update 20150403: some webinar recordings can be viewed on iOS devices!]

I attended the Effective Project Manager and The Roles of ‘Adaptive Reasoning and Problem Solving’ in PM webinars. Dana Clarke was speaker of the second one and he shared his experiences of using TRIZ (The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) in managing projects. It was a great presenter and it was a great webinar too!

ProjectManagement.com hosts many webinars. It helps project managers to use more online collaborations, no matter Adobe Connect or Cisco WebEx or others. Online meetings connect people located in different physical locations and improves communication among them by adding visual information to audio-only discussion. I believe you agree that it is an useful tool!

Last Sat I joined The Art of Making Impactful Charts workshop organised by Knowledge Century. It was an onsite workshop and twenty something people from different industries took part in it. It was not about those marketing centric or Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 biz pitching type of presentations. The workshop was designed for management presentation. Miles Au Yeung shared his experience in how to effectively use presentation to convey findings, perspectives and supporting facts. Here are the FOUR EASY’S of impactful charts advocated by Miles:
-Easy to get the message across
-Easy to memorise
-Easy to follow
-Easy to present

Attendees were grouped into teams and each team had to apply Miles’ ideas to present in the workshop. It was fun and interesting. When to use Pie/Bar/Column/Line/Dot chart? It was cool to unlearn something old and learn something new in this beautiful Saturday morning!

Thanks to ProjectManagement.com and Knowledge Century for organising these useful and interactive learning events. Cheers!

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