This year has opened a wealth of speaking opportunities to me. I was informed about this conference by Bruce Gay who is heavily involved in the PMI Pittsburgh chapter and someone who I am very proud to call a friend. PittAgile is normally a day’s conference, but this year they did something different and combined the day with the Professional Day of learning. There were different tracks to choose from (Agile, PMs in an agile world, the changing role of Project Managers and creating a truly agile organisation).

One of the things that I really enjoyed about this conference was their ability to combine Agile and other forms of Project Management into one brilliant mix. There has been some great networking and “virtual coffee’s” to have with other attendees and I’ve really enjoyed the interactions.

My talk:

This presentation was around the Chameleon leader and how to be an effective leader in virtual times. I really wanted to change the focus of this talk to bring in active collaboration with the attendees and learn more about how they are managing expectations and modifying the talk to be able to address their key concers and issues that they’re facing at the moment. We covered the following topics:

• How to support/encourage an effective Work/ Life Balance
  • Working with people who do not want to take vacation/ switch off
• Effective Stakeholder Management and how the COVID volatility has impacted and hindered our ability to manage and capture Stakeholder wishes and definitions
• Managing Expectations virtually / how to host workshops / best tools to use
• Teambuilding virtually and how to build rapport virtually

I will be doing several follow up blogs on these topics in the coming weeks as I’m finding that they can be really useful for the wider Project Management community. I was really fortunate that I had such an engaging and supportive audience who not only were so willing to give their own experiences but also share where they were having issues.

Being able to listen to others experiences and insights has really made me evaluate how I present this deck and what are the important factors to consider in today’s climate.

Did you attend PittAgile? What did you think? What was your favourite session?