PMI SFBAC Blog

What Animal are You ?

2011-10-28T10:14:00.000-07:00

One of the more interesting activities at this year's LIM was from Stefan Swanepoel who delivered a keynote based on his book "Surviving the Serengeti". He used animals from the Serengeti as a metaphor for personality traits, under the theory it's a bit easier to internalize than some of the other tests like Meyers-Briggs or any of the many personality tests.

During his talk, he gave us the link http://whatanimalami.com/ and asked us to take the quiz (he even encouraged us to whip out our iPhones to do so).

He also made it an interesting networking opportunity: he had placed bookmarks with various animals on them, and asked us to use them as trading cards to get our own animals. As you may have guessed because we're all volunteer leaders, certain animals were more common than others (I was surprised by how many were Crocodiles, which was what I turned out to be).

The test is free, use it as an icebreaker with your team. Let us know what animal your are, and how well you think it suits you.

The Pace of Change

2011-09-26T16:25:00.000-07:00

The only thing that is certain not to change is that things will change.

I often find myself very grateful for this adage, since as a project manager, the thing that keeps me employed is mostly change. For the most part, a project is done because something is being changed.

For instance a construction project is building something new, changing a structure, or tearing something down. Software is changing something to fix, make it better, or creating something that's never existed before.

We are transforming PMI SFBAC to better serve you and to grow the value of the community to you as an individual.

So in the spirit of change, I've been hard at work with my team on improving the infrastructure that the leadership team for PMI SFBAC uses to create value for our community.

I've cleaned up some internal things (like moving the blogs under the PMI SFBAC branding), and have been working diligently to get our teams to communicate better internally.

And now we're working on finding better ways to manage how we communicate what is going on to you. Part of that effort is things like this blog.

Other parts are things like our new Meetup site (http://meetup.pmi-sfbac.org) where you can suggest events that PMI SFBAC should have, and EventBrite (http://pmi-sfbac.eventbrite.com) where we'll be posting events for the calendar.

One of the benefits of these changes is that we've been able to set things up to automatically notify you about things that are happening, and help make it easier to interact with social media as well.

The thing about change is it is always too fast and too slow at the same time. If you're waiting for a change, it's taking too long. If you aren't prepared for the change, it's too fast.

Look for more changes, and let us know what you think of the ones we're making - too fast, too slow ?

Welcome to the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the Project Management Institute

2011-09-24T10:50:00.000-07:00

We've been busy working on our ability to communicate with the community more effectively, including establishing several new pages that will be updated by leaders in the community.

The most immediate change is that we've changed the links to all of our pages on Blogger to be part of the pmi-sfbac.org domain. These can be found on the "Connect" link on our home page at http://www.pmi-sfbac.org/ along with other interesting links.

These PMI SFBAC branded items are:

Chapter - http://blog.pmi-sfbac.org/ - You're reading this one now, it will have general updates from the Board of Directors and information that may be useful.
Chapter History - http://history.pmi-sfbac.org/ - A blog that contains posts about our long history as a PMI chapter.
Chapter PMO Blog - http://pmo.pmi-sfbac.org/ - A blog that contains posts about all things related to Project Management Office, including insights about how we are running the chapter's own PMO.
Chapter Green Blog - http://greenblog.pmi-sfbac.org/ - A blog about the chapter's green initiatives, and things of interest to the green community.

We've also been busy integrating all of these things with our social media efforts, so look for posts that come directly from the work being done on these various Blogger sites.