Project management is everywhere: Two events attended yesterday

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend two different events. In the morning one organized by Oracle titled "How to transform your business with Big Data Analytics", and in the evening one organized by the IE Alumni (Instituto de Empresa Business School) titled "Keys for an effective negotiation".

What seems at a first glance to have both events in common? Reading the titles, you see that one is related to Technology and the another one is related to Human Skills. In the first case, you use the technology for the transformation of your business, and in the second one you enhance your human skills for making business. Therefore, BUSINESS may be what most of the people would say that was common in both events.

But once you attend both events, you find out that there is another common thing in both, and are the PROJECTS, and the project management. Let´s see why, going briefly into the content of both.

Nowadays, the world if full of data. The amount of data is so huge, that we do not have the capacity of processing all and make use of it. With big data technologies, not only you can handle all the data, if not that you can add intelligence on the processing, being able to get answers to questions that we have not formulated before. This area has an impressive future, and it would take many posts to be able to present it. Anyway, as this is a project management blog, I will jump directly in the agenda of the event to the presentation done by Luis Esteban, Chief Data Officer of CaixaBank, "Innovation for customer service".

His presentation was about what is CaixaBank doing with big data analytics for improving their customer´s satisfaction. He is CDO, C-level, and I was impressed by the fact that he was all the time in his speech talking about PROJECTS!. They work in a project driven mode for achieving their business goals. And as it happens everywhere (as far as I know), he mentioned that all transformation projects face resistance in the organization, but they overcome it mainly with these two points:

• Involving the final users in the project
• Having as sponsor of the project the CEO

How many companies around the world have this project orientation???...

Regarding the event organized by the IE, driven by Pilar Galeote (IE professor), the relationship with the projects is inmediate. How many negotiations (internal and external) do you have in every project you lead? Negotiations are in all the life cycle of the project, since the opportunity is detected, till the the deliverables of the project are handed over to the customer.

Briefly, the session was driven by the method case used by most of the business schools, and it was around the negotiation based on principles/interests. This event could take an additional post, therefore i will not expand the matter here.

As can be seen, projects are everywhere, therefore the project management should not be considered a fashion, if not a need, but about this I will write more in my next post, under the initiative promoted by PMideas, where more than 30 bloggers will write about "Project Management, a Fashion or a Need?" on the 24th of April.