Keynotes and Seminars on Running Projects Properly

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eCameron provides a variety of keynotes and seminars for your company or organization. They are broken into two groups—the Back From Red^TM and the Business Advancement Series. The former, the Back From Red Series, focuses on topics that are directly associated with properly running projects in any organization. The latter, the Business Advancement Series, addresses topics that are broader in reach than a project. These topics can be combined or customized to meet your group's needs.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to email or call us at 1-360-834-7361.

Current keynote topics include:

The Back From Red Series
The Visualizing Change Series
- Project Prototyping
- Breaking down Barriers between IT and the Business (Coming Soon)
- Managing Merger Integration (Coming Soon)
The Business Advancement Series

Below is a partial list of the organizations that have or will be presented to (Conferences in red, Keynotes in blue, others in Black):

Visualizing Change

Have you ever wondered how ropes, name tags, blindfolds, watermelons, and elastic bands could be used in a business presentation? They all represent constraints and conditions in our everyday work life.

Visualizing Change, is a new highly interactive form of presentation. It is used to address virtually any problem. If desired, it can be used to apply a set of principles to test how they can affect the problem. Visualizing Change are primarily custom presentations targeting a specific problem the client may be experiencing. The general format of the presentation are:

Finding Gold in Red Projects

The ability to deliver initiatives that make breakthroughs in the business is the differentiator of a truly successful IT department. However, the project success rates are very poor. Failure rate estimates range from 40-75% of project are over budget, late, or fail to deliver the required functionality.

Failing projects are prevalent in all industries and, although the actual failure rates are very subjective, the incidence of troubled projects is easily more than half of all projects. Finding the Gold in Red Projects looks at the value in performing a formal recovery on a red projects. It uses current and historical data, case studies, and the presenters twenty-five years experience of recovering projects to illustrate the process.

Back from Red: Recovering Failing Projects

Estimates for the annual cost of project failure are as high as two trillion dollars a year. The rates for projects being at risk are in the 60-70% range, and a quarter of all project's problems are so bad they are simply canceled prior completion. Preferably, all projects will run according to plan. However, moving from a 60% failure rate to 0% is unrealistic. First, organizations must understand what it is that makes their projects fail. Reasons range from methodology to human failure to poorly understood concepts to scope creep. Analyzing projects as systems uncovers all the factors that can contribute to failure.

Back From Red: Recovering Failing Projects describes the key elements in recovering red projects. It is based on the process developed while recovering dozens of projects. It covers:

Estimating: The Sociological Effects in a Group

Whether you are a project or a functional manager, estimates are a daily part of your life. Team members need to make estimates for a variety of reasons, these include:

The amount of time for a task.
The cost for resources.
The cost of software, hardware and other materials.
The time required to finish a task.

However, there are many problems with estimates. This presentation focuses on the sociological and psychological aspects of doing estimates.

The Executive's Role in Project Success

Project failure is rampant in nearly every industry. In the US alone, the cost are huge with estimates running as high as a trillion dollars a year. In most cases, the project manager and his or her team are blamed. The project, however, is only the symptom with the source of the failure imbedded in the organization. Project pressure stresses the weak links in the organization causing them to snap.

People or Process: Which Has the Greater Effect on Project Success

People or Process, as the name implies, looks directly at the role of people versus process in a project’s success or failure. The focus on process is a needed component, but does not obviate the need to manage people. Unfortunately, the trend over the last fifteen years has been to focus on process and reduce the project to a checklist of tasks. This has created a culture that neglects the value of a manager with people skills.

Negotiation and Management

People often fail to realize how many actions in life are negotiation based. This is no different for in our work life. From managing projects to negotiating a raise, we do some form of negotiation daily. Implementing a process around negotiation is key in maximizing success. A process ensures collecting the correct information for preparing and proposing the new idea.

This presentation covers:

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