If you are a Project Management professional in Bangalore or anywhere in the Indian sub continent its time – to get out of you cubicles and pause your meetings to block your calendars!

It’s raining PM conferences in Bangalore! – 3 of them this year!

Its a great time for you to get out there and meet your peers from various organizations, share experiences, challenges, share tool expertise and best practices.

All this only indicate the demand for PM practitioners to come together and share. After all Bangalore is the hub of a lot of IT, Space, Construction, Aeronautics among other industries.

PML conference by QAI – May 30 – 31, 2008

The One and Only full movie

This conference by QAI promises 2 days of action packed at Le Meridien with 12 plenary speakers and 18 papers and practices. The highlight of the conference is the Project Management Leadership Award – “Leadership Recognized“. There is a panel discussion on the “Emerging challenges for Indian project managers in global context”. One of the interesting talks is by Tarak Bajaj of Delphi on “Project Management for TATA Nano Electronics cluster”. The conference cover only the IT industry. Conference fee is Rs. 7500. 14 PDUs for participation.

SPM ICON 2008 by QSIT – July 17 – 19, 2008 Batman ipod

• Breakfast at Tiffany’s video

QSIT‘s conference at Leela Palace is 2 day conference with one earlier day covering tutorials. There are 4 tutorials on the 17th of July on rather familiar PM topics. There are 2 key notes – Lakshmi Narayanan (Chairman, NASSCOM) and

• Banana Joe film

Raj Kalady (PMI). There are 10 key talks and 12 paper presentations. The is also a panel discussion on the topic “Managing Projects in a Global context” (almost identical to the PML panel discussion!!! sign of the times?!). 26 PDUs for 3 days.

PMPC 2008 by PMI Bangalore – September 18 – 20, 2008

• Columbus Day movie

The Project Management Practitioner’s conference 2008 (PMPC) – This is one of the most awaited and prestigious PM conference of the year organized by PMI Bangalore at “The Capitol”. The conference has been announced to be held from 18th to 20th of September this year.

Killing Zoe video The conference seeks to bring together Project Management practitioners and the key stakeholders namely – Industry, Academia, Government and Society. The conference seeks to brings Project management learnings from large projects from various industries.

Last year’s conference had – 3 days, 7 keynotes, 28 speakers, 3 panel discussions and 10 industries

. Some of the key speakers of last year included T.R.Anand (Satyam), N.S.Parthasarathy (MindTree), Dr. Prahlada (DRDO), Sqn. Ldr. B.C. Srikanta (ADA), Stéphane Vesval (EADS) amongst others.

(Disclosure: the blog post author is associated with PMI Bangalore)

More the merrier


The numerous PM conferences only underscore the need for better Program and Project and the huge demand for PM practitioners in the burgeoning IT services industry. And it is interesting to note that vendors like Serena and iPlan are sponsoring more than one event. And don’t be surprised if all of these run full capacity.

The demand for Project management is simply there in abundance to fuel all these conferences!

There were some rules at the venue:

The Thoughtworks folks had gone out of the way to make barcampers comfortable. They had cleared their work areas to let us use them for the event. This however came with some limitations which was understandable. Photography was banned and some tables and work areas were out of bounds. The atmosphere was great and set a great stage for a barcamp.

There were official photographers:

Photography was restricted to he “official” photographers due to the regulations of being an STP. Some of us (about 6 of us) were lucky to get flagged of as official photographers. I can’t imagine being in a barcamp without being able to shoot.  Felt like Reuters feeding my photographs on flickr for the bloggers at the venue after every session.

There were VCs:

C.H.U.D.

There were the usual suspects:

Muthu, Rajiv, Vakils, Harish, Kiruba, Satish, Rajan, and yours truly from previous barcamps. There were many others who were missing in action this year.

There were some women who spoke…

Sowmya from Aditi and Kavitha from Minglebox. There were a fair amount of women in the audience, but don’t remember seeing too many of them asking questions or making a point.
 
   

There were bloggers:

Not a battery of them like last year. But there were folks who live blogged though few.

The things I liked:

• The Thoughtworks venue was great. Lot of space, large rooms.
• Great internet speed. The best I have seen in 3 barcamps.
• The food was good.
• This time there a few women who spoke. This is an encouraging trend.

Things that set me thinking:

• Many of those who were actively involved in the debates did not show up this year. In fact I cant think of more than 15 people (in the 196 at Barcamp Bangalore 2) who were there last year.
• VCs seemed to get slots on demand. In fact we started of with a VC session. Wasn’t barcamp meant to be the hot bed of ideas and interesting debate.
• The afternoon sessions were lean. Where did all the people go?
• The exciting debates of last year were missed. We did have a great discussion during the Minglebox session on Media companies Vs Product/Application companies.

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