The professional growth event – which starts at 5 p.m. before every dinner meeting – has certainly attracted numerous project managers who attend the PMI Dinner Meeting. Someone mentioned that getting two PDUs for the price of one might have something to do with the great number of attendees! (This author thinks it’s a steal: Where else would you get a chance to connect with some wonderful people, share ideas, and gain PDUs at the same time?)

This month’s professional growth event featured a presentation on MS Project 2010. (There is more information on MS Project 2010 at this link www.microsoft.com/epm.)

The dinner meeting’s primary speaker, Anthony Reed, holder of both the PMP and Certified Public Accountant (CPA) professional certifications, has worked in IT for 30 years.  A technologist denigrated as someone who didn’t understand such business process fundamentals as accounting and finance, Mr. Reed was spurred to earn his CPA. He thought it essential to seeing the links between business and technology.

Mr. Reed, an avid marathoner, used wit, humor, and subtlety to describe the ways in which he builds teams to solve business and technical problems. Drawing upon both his marathon running and project management experience, Mr. Reed follows the advice “When in doubt – run!” as a way to clear his mind and allow his subconscious to work the problem out. Having literally “stepped back” (and out), Mr. Reed said he is able to come up with solutions that almost reveal themselves.

His topic , “There is an ‘I’ in Team,” ran counter to the usual take on team-building in that he emphasized the importance of “individuals” to the process. He described his perspective by pointing out that there are four “I’s” in the word TEAM – vertical lines or I’s that make up the letters T, E, M.  For Mr. Reed, teams will be stronger and more effective if we also pay attention to the development of individuals.  The I’s explained by Mr.Reed in detail were

• Ideas (Goals)
  • It’s important to focus individuals on SMART goals with an emphasis on the time frame allotted to achieve those goals.
• Incentive  (Motivation)
  • Individual motivation will help the team motivation. His tip “Be among Eagles, not Pigeons” explained how associating with the people who were ambitious and were motivated to achieve extraordinary goals resulted in his becoming the first black man to run seven marathons on seven different continents.
• Instruction (Planning)
  • With planning, Mr. Reed pointed out that individuals in a team should be guided to focus 100% on the current task at hand and realize that success in each of the individual steps leads to overall project success. He stressed that a good risk mitigation plan is essential for the success of a project.
• Implementation (Execution)
  • While executing the plan, there will always be challenges. Individuals should be encouraged to contribute individual solutions to help the team arrive at a better group resolution. Mr. Reed also stressed the importance of the team leader’s behavior during times of distress. If the leader panics, the team panics; if the leader stays cool, calm, and analytical, so will the team.

The message was to focus on building strong individuals to build a strong team.

His book, Finding the I in TEAM: Better Team Building through Individual Building, may be a worthwhile read; this author plans to get his own copy.