Thursday, May 22, 2008 Luncheon: The Right Brain Side of Program Management: Innovation, Creativity, and Intuition Have your warning bells ever gone off but you didn’t know how to avoid program danger without micromanaging your team?   Left brain tools like Work Breakdown Structure and trade off analysis are relatively easy for you to learn. But how you respond when your intuition gives you hints to the health of your program, can give you and your team the edge you need to raise the performance bar. Inspirational program managers harness the power of their intuition and innovation to create team cultures where problems are prevented in an environment of respect and high performance.   Learn techniques for harnessing your creative power toward values driven innovation to respond to those intuitive messages.  Help yourself, and your team, expose the issues underlying those “intuitions” before they snowball.     Speaker Biography Tami Carlson has over 25 years of program management experience in high technology, beginning in the Electronic Test & Measurement industry in 1982.   Tami’s career began as semiconductor device engineer for high speed bipolar processes, where just three years out of college she discovered a fascination with program management when she managed the transfer of a semiconductor process from development into manufacturing.   She has driven a broad range of programs from product development, process improvement, integration of acquired companies, to business growth and strategy development. She has a passion for growing people and organizations.   Tami has a broad background in technologies ranging from semiconductor and computing, to wireless communication technologies.  She has held engineering, marketing, program and general management positions of advancing responsibility. Tami earned her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University. 11:30am - 1:20pm $26Pre-Registration (VISA, MC, AMEX) $30Walk-in (Cash or Check ONLY) Register Thursday, May 29, 2008 Learning Breakfast: Improving Project Communication TIPS, TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES THAT REALLY DELIVER YOUR NEWS AND GET ACTION! Whether you’re writing a project deliverable or the weekly status report, leading a meeting across three time zones or presenting to top level stakeholders, project communications are supposed to accomplish one important thing: Make progress!   How do you do that? By saying it well, with clarity, being memorable and developing messages that deliver just what your project needs to get action, resolve issues, and solve problems. That’s what effective project communications do. The presenter will discuss optimizing various forms of communications most critical to projects — improving standard templates, punching up “ho-hum” status reports, letting the team know current status and updating over-busy executives who have little time to spare.   This Learning Breakfast is for anyone working on projects who creates, revises, improves or delivers project communications. This can be a refresher for seasoned project participants or an introduction for those who are just beginning to discover the challenges of project communications.   Participants will take away for future reference some “Fresh Tips,” project communications best practices, for future use.   PRESENTER: SUSAN DE LA VERGNE Compassion, humor and insight characterize Susan de la Vergne’s presentations. Add to that her 20+ years of management experience, and you get both credibility and inspiration.   Susan’s track record in Information Technology, where she’s spent most of her career (so far!), includes successfully leading complex, high visibility projects and implementing organization-wide change initiatives. Today, as a writer and speaker, she specializes in topics for engineering and high tech professionals, including leadership and communication. Her well-researched material—she’s an avid reader! — combined with stories from her own experience infuse her audiences with a renewed sense of purpose about what they do and confidence about themselves on the job.   Her book, YOU CAN’T MANAGE TIME - BUT YOU CAN MANAGE MANY Priorities, offers a fresh approach to an age-old problem. Her new book, Terrific Technical Presentations (due out fall 2008) is aimed at engineering and high tech professionals, helping them prepare and deliver interesting, energized technical presentations. 8:00am - 12:00pm $65 Pre-Registration (VISA, MC, AMEX) Register located at the Kingstad Business Center in Beaverton Map: http://www.kingstad.com/locations/beaverton.html

Ways to Participate in PMF
Your participation is what makes PMF great and we would like you to be more involved. What can you do? Beyond attending our luncheons, there are opportunities to participate in planning and strategy, serve on the board of directors, or help with communications. You can also contribute case studies or presentation ideas. Contact us to get involved.