Changing large enterprises is not an easy thing, especially when you touch the foundations of their management culture. Those being highly regulated are even more challenging to move forward, as there is always some legal excuse that cements the status-quo. But, it has been done successfully in several large organizations and that success can be repeated. This presentation is a practitioner’s retrospective on things that worked well and those that didn’t when corporations were trying to go agile. It also summarizes steps that are necessary to take in order to make the agility stay and even evolve further. The entire content is presented from strategic perspective that goes well beyond single departments such as IT. It’s because you can’t turn the elephant agile by making only one leg flexible…

Project management has evolved kind of alongside product management. Many companies have even set up independent silo organizations for each of these areas. And yet, in product companies, the product management cycle is naturally connected with programs and projects. That is why many organizations today combine these areas and manage them in an integrated way. We have also noticed this at PMI by establishing close cooperation with PDMA (Product Development and Management Association). In this speech, I will share the conclusions resulting from over a year of work of an international team of experts from both organizations, of which I had the pleasure to be a member. Several organizations took this route already and today they look at product related projects in a completely different way.

The dynamics of changes in today’s businesses combined with complexity of IT systems behind them lead to significant challenges in projects. To overcome them, project teams must learn new ways of working together in an agile environment and building shared understanding of business and technology. This presentation is based on actual cases from mid-size and large business projects where IT played a significant role. By analysing success factors and reasons for failures in those cases, it demonstrates a set of working approaches to bridge the gaps between business sponsors, key users, IT staff, IT suppliers and project management teams.

Large programs don’t operate in vacuum. All of them become significant part of the performing organization’s day-to-day business. Programs always impact the organization’s power structures and processes, engage substantial part of their talent and consume vast amounts of resources. This can lead to numerous conflicts and significantly decrease the performance, not only of the program itself, but also of the performing organization. Many organizations are not prepared to handle such a great “irregularity”. Therefore, organizational readiness is one of the key factors to consider when starting large initiatives. This presentation will show you a practical approach to diagnose the situation in your organization and take the necessary steps to ensure proper environment for the upcoming and existing programs.

While most organizations focus on project managers, a key role of sponsors tends to be neglected or overlooked. They are often unknown, absent or present in a way that doesn’t really help the project. And it is this person who should be eagerly waiting for the effect of the project as for a Christmas present. It should be their success. Fortunately, there are many sponsors who know why they implement the project, passionately support the project manager in its implementation and willingly use the effects of the team’s work. This presentation will be about them.

This interactive webinar will take participants through the key pillars of innovation culture and will Introduce them to several tools that can stimulate innovation in everyday activities. We start by understanding what do we call innovation and why it’s not just about brainstorming great ideas. As culture usually eats the innovation for breakfast, the webinar is full of stories on how real-life organizations successfully foster the culture of innovation and develop mechanisms to make innovation happen. We also discuss techniques that help to bring innovation to individual projects, driving continuous development. Finally, we look at how agility comes to the picture.

Top performing organizations have learned a long time ago that a full alignment of business as usual with PP&P activities is a must. It’s simply the only way to ensure that full potential of the organization is used not only to respond to market changes, but actually to lead them. There is no place for resource wars, functional kingdoms and freedom to run any part of the business at the expense of another. All the elements of the machine must work tightly together. And that’s what we call an alignment. This is why PMI has even changed the way its standards are written to emphasize the need for an integrated management of operations, portfolios and programs.

While agile approach has proven to be extremely successful for some organizations, many have managed to implement a caricature of it and later claim that agility is nonsense. It has led to numerous myths and misunderstandings about agility as such, not to mention claims about business loses caused by going agile. This provocative presentation shows how agility might be misunderstood and how organizations often take it completely wrong. It’s all about using the right concepts in an absurd way. At the same time, you will receive several practical hints on doing it right. All tested on humans and organizations. It will make you laugh and cry at the same time as all examples will be real life case studies from real organizations. Maybe even yours…

Large organizations are full of opportunities. No wonder that many IT companies would love to do business with them. They just need to realize that dealing with large business elephants is quite different than typical ‘business as usual’ among small and medium organizations. If that’s also where your projects are going, come and listen about essential survival tips that might save your project and maybe even open the door to the world of opportunities…

Does our brain make us act rationally? Does it always suggest solutions that will satisfy us when we successfully implement them? Does making a decision always involve thinking? And what if we have a lot of traps in our head, which sometimes make life easier, but often make us wonder at our decisions later? As conscious project leaders, we should understand ourselves and the mechanisms that often prevent us and our team members from making good decisions. The discoveries of modern behavioral psychology come to our aid, some of them even awarded with the Nobel Prize.

They say empathy is important. They say it helps to understand. They say it makes your project better. But… is it really that way? Come and see the dark side of it and decide for yourself which side you’ll take! You will see how your empathy can work against you during negotiations, tough decisions (especially when things already went bad) or situations when someone wants to simply manipulate you.