This week I had the pleasure of presenting at a brand new conference in the Netherlands called: PM Congress. It was organised by a Technical University in Delft and had a very different feel to other conferences where the emphasis was on: Research meets Practice.

The theme of the conference was “Adapt or Die” and it was really interesting to see how other Project Managers approached this topic within this project. What was unique about this conference was the keynote. Normally, you would have one topic over 60-90 minutes but during this conference they had 4! Yes, 4 different presentations from different presenters about everything from adapting to complex projects, the future of Project Management and why it’s important to adapt to changes in your projects.

I was using this conference to not only gain knowledge from my peers but also to learn the latest research on the future of Project Management and the best ways to adapt to the complex project situations that we’re often facing in our projects.

I was very fortunate to have some great Project Management peers who were also presenting to share the day with and I’ve learnt so much! Bruce Gay gave multiple presentations on Design thinking (which has completely changed my perception of it!) and Barry Curry gave a great presentation on how to rescue projects in trouble.

Returning to my presentation, this was a brand new presentation and it was a lot shorter than I’d ideally like! The topic was called: How to be a chameleon in your projects and the main aim of the presentation was to show how you can be versatile in your projects and why it is so important in today’s projects.

Whilst using Project Management theory to give a summary for why it’s important to look at your stakeholders, how you plan your communications and how they should be altered to the different groups.

It said a lot that during the question and answer session that I had a lot of questions regarding how the individual attendees could implement my recommendations into their individual projects and issues. I was honoured that I could take the time after my session to answer questions from the audience and give them advice.