Project Managers Forum – PMI chapter Colombo

Oh yeah.. High time to collect some PDUS.. Seems everybody has realized it.. At last PMI chapter SL is trying to conduct some events for Project Managers. A very big “thank you” to them who initiated it.

The Chapter conducted its Forum meeting session on last Friday (14^th March) at Taj. The event was scheduled from 5.30 to 7.30.PM I reached there around 6PM and to my luck it has not been started at 5.30 may be due to heavy rain and bad weather.

I saw Madhu (most of us should be thankful to her for initiating PMI chapter in SL as well as all the good teaching she did when we were doing the 30 hour preparation classes) and I was very happy to see her after long time.. I saw only 2 friends who did PMP with me and seems most of the people either given up on PMP certification or they have already collected enough PDUs and didn’t care to attend to the forum meeting..

But still I can’t be too sure.. I heard that Colombo chapter has had 3 sessions before but this is the very 1^st invitation I have received.. May be they have missed the others... No idea...

Ok back to the session..

One director of the board conducted the starting session with some insight on how to collect PDUs from various Medias. I think that was a good eye opener for most of us who are too lazy to log in to the web site and claim for PDUs.. Now I have I added it to my priority tasks.. Thanks for that..

The main session was the Risk Management lecture conducted by the guest Speaker Mr. Ravi Shankar – CEO of VSNL Lanka (TATA indicom – SL ) . He seems very knowledgeable and experienced....But it was very hard for me to understand his heavy Indian accent.

I made all the effort to follow it seriously and I love the example he made of himself when explaining the fact that “Unawareness makes people more confident of taking risks” J.. He seems very right. However that doesn’t mean that we don’t take risks when we are aware of them.. but the awareness allow us to quantify the risks and have better fall back plans .. In professional life as well as in personal life..He explained it nicely.

He stressed the point that risk management is always an investment.. Which is absolutely important..But unfortunately most the companies (Specially the SME level Software companies) do not think that way.. that may be one reason why this type of companies always falling to hard times. If a company won’t take risk., that will drastically affect the growth of the company, and the company will not grow., but at the same time, if a company takes risky decisions without being well aware of risk situation and without having proper strategies to eliminate them, then again the companies will fall in to major disasters unless the owners have some “lucky starts”.. However he said loud and (clear?).. You should never be successful by chance.. You should be successful by strategy..

Most the other points which he discussed at the session are the normal risk management theories which helped to refresh our memory about what we have learned on Risk Management.

Any way thanks to the chapter for organizing the event.. I’m sure there will be much more participants and some useful discussions for the next sessions..

If any PMI member or any other project manager is interested, the next events are scheduled as follows;

22^nd May

21^st August

20^th November