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 It’s hard to believe that summer is here, the kids are out of school and hurricane season is under way! As part of my family’s hurricane preparedness (and our risk management planning!), we started up our generator that we bought after Wilma and have never used! The test was successful, thank goodness! Hope we don’t have to use it this year, either!
Did you participate in the Chapter opportunities to ‘Connect and Learn’ in early May? Our May 2nd Professional Development Day (PDD) at the Signature Grand was a fabulous success! We had 350 people attend – a record for the Chapter! I had a wonderful time meeting and chatting with as many of you as I could and hope you did, too. The attendee surveys showed high scores for the speakers and the event. Everyone seems to want us to do this again real soon. Tricia Geary, our VP of Professional Development and her team did a wonderful job! Our May 6th Job Fair, our 6th annual, was a resounding success at the Signature Grand. We had over 250 job seekers to meet with over 30 hiring companies. Not bad for an economic downturn! Everyone told us they had a great time and found the evening very helpful in their job searches and/or networking. I want to thank Kim Caruthers, John Lopez and the team for a job well done! The Chapter has a new location for the Miami Dade dinner meeting, the Hotel Intercontinental Miami West, and based on the feedback from the attendees of the June 11th meeting, the hotel was a great hit! We had 50 people attend (a nice increase from our usual 30) and listen to Connie Maldonado speak on the latest generation of project managers – the Millenials. I was happy to see so many new faces. Speaking of new faces, I established a new program at the June dinner meetings called the Ambassador Program. From now on, at every dinner meeting, several volunteer Chapter members called Ambassadors wearing special ‘Ambassador’ name tags will seek out people wearing a special ‘First Timer’ name tag and tell them about our Chapter and give them the extra attention to make them feel welcome. We plan to track the program success in repeat attendees and increased membership. Have you checked out the discussion forum on our website? I’m so impressed by some of the entries there! Someone gave wonderful positive feedback on Connie presentation in June and mentioned being a First Timer, too! The Chapter is busy planning a really special series of events on September 9th when the CEO of Global PMI, Greg Balestrero, takes a rare trip south to visit our Chapter! You may remember that I mentioned his visit in my January President’s message. First, Greg will be the featured speaker at a CEO Executive Roundtable breakfast with CEOs from South Florida businesses. Our Chapter is hosting this event and we’ll be sending out invitations soon to CEOs in the area. Second our Chapter is collaborating with the Construction Specification Institute (CSI) to bring you the afternoon networking event for professional associations leaders to meet with Greg Last, but not least, the Chapter will co-host a special dinner meeting in the evening where Greg will speak on "The Battle for Talent: Dealing with the shortage of Project Managers across the globe". Look for more details on all three events on our website and in future e-mail blasts. Our Chapter is developing a Center of Excellence Program. The goal of the Program is to facilitate the sharing of project management best practices between South Florida Project Managers. DeVry University students – most of them are members of the DeVry Project Management Club – are helping the Chapter by creating a Scope Statement and an Implementation Plan for the program. The results of the program will include road show presentations for executives, lunch and learn roundtable discussions on PM topics of interest and a knowledge base of project managers and their best practices and methodology capabilities. Chapter Elections are coming up and will take place between August and October. Chapter members will vote on a new President-elect, VP of Finance, VP of Marketing and VP of Communication. We have some changes to by-laws for your approval, too, such as changing the VP of Professional Development to a Director of Seminars role reporting to the VP of Education. This organizational change will facilitate recruitment of volunteers for specific seminar events and create synergies within the Education committee. Don’t forget, if you have a project you would like to have considered for PMI Project of the Year and Chapter Project of the Year next year, please submit your project to
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by September 1, 2008. The project selected as the winning entry by the Chapter Board will be submitted to PMI and awarded Chapter Project of the Year next year at our award ceremony. |
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