Showcase: books and sins

ByElizabeth Harrin Last updated: General

I was at the Best Practice Showcase last Tuesday and I actually had a really good time, which is strange given that it was mainly an event for project management training companies to sell at the punters. There are some people I only get to see at conferences and I met some new people too like the gang at Maven Training and a very interesting woman from the Department of Justice who had a name badge saying ‘Carol” but she was actually someone else.

I wasn’t able to stay very long so I planned to arrive really early for a trip round the exhibition hall before heading to the first session. Unfortunately I arrived really early and some of the stands were still setting up. Never one to turn down free croissants, I sat and read through my delegate pack, being very project management-y about it and circling stands and vendors I wanted to visit.

The Showcase was also the launch event for three new books:

I was lucky enough to get my hands on copies of all of these – they were almost warm, they were so hot off the press – and I’ll be reviewing them here in the next weeks. Melanie Franklin, CEO of Maven, and Susan Tuttle have written all three. Maven is working on something very interesting with training, and if it comes off it will be fab- more details as I have them.

After my quick dart round the hall, stopping at Project Manager Today and The National Centre for Project Management and avoiding people trying to sell me software, I attended a round table discussion called ‘Power to the People’ led by Barry Corless and Ian Clarkson from Remarc. We talked about how the traditional triangle of people/product/process has now become a square, and ‘arranged marriages’ between partners are now very common.

Square with corners marked People, Process, Partners, Products

It’s true. Now more and more tasks are outsourced we expect third party providers to be able to work together, even though they never asked for that or perhaps even realised that’s what they were letting themselves in for. There’s a whole new branch to project management which is negotiating between partners. The rest of the presentation was really a shorter version of what I think they run as a full-on seminar called ‘7 Deadly Sins of Project Management’ – although I have put the leaflet in the recycling already so I can’t tell you much more about it. Under the banner of ‘Make sin work for you!’ we talked about how actually things that seem bad can be good:

  • Wrath: Conflict management. It’s good to provide a forum for people to let off steam
  • Lust: Coaching/mentoring. Create a ‘want’ in the person you are coaching so they feel the benefit of working towards goals
  • Gluttony: Time management. Manage your time well and delegate well and you’ll achieve lots
  • Pride: Delegation. Feel good about developing your team and also freeing up your own time
  • Envy: Team work. Foster a feeling of ‘we want to be as good as them’ amongst other teams in your company

Sloth and Greed didn’t fit that well into this approach, and as you can see it is hardly rocket science. However, the ‘deadly sins’ angle is interesting and I imagine that teaching the same old tenets of good communication, time management and creative problem solving can get a bit boring after a while. Ian and Barry were certainly enthusiastic presenters who knew their stuff, so all credit to them for trying to make it more lively.

Elizabeth Harrin wearing a pink scarf

Project manager, author, mentor

Elizabeth Harrin is a Fellow of the Association for Project Management in the UK. She holds degrees from the University of York and Roehampton University, and several project management certifications including APM PMQ. She first took her PRINCE2 Practitioner exam in 2004 and has worked extensively in project delivery for over 20 years.
Elizabeth is also the founder of the Project Management Rebels community, a mentoring group for professionals. She's written several books for project managers including Managing Multiple Projects.