Project Management Institute (PMI) and Project Management Institute Mongolia Chapter to organize its Second Annual International Conference & Workshop on Project Manage under the theme of ‘Capacity Building for the Future" at Blue Sky Tower during June 5-6, 2015.
We interviewed with Secretary General and Executive Director of Project Management Institute Mongolia Chapter Mr.Marc A. Tassé.
Why did you decide to organize your second annual conference and workshop?
-The first year’s of conference was an important component of promoting and making people aware of the different aspects of project management and how it relates to different government projects, private projects and NGO projects that are happening here. We wanted to give people the opportunity over two days to see what exactly project management is and hear from speakers running projects within Mongolia effectively and foreign speakers talking about what are the potential opportunities here in Mongolia.
Running conferences is one of the core requirements and one of the main purposes of having Project Management International Mongolia Chapter. It is our mandate to run an annual conference in Mongolia to provide an opportunity for learning.
Can you tell me the different sides of this conference, as the topic is capacity building?
-Last year`s conference, we focused on project management in emerging economies. This focus was to show the participants that project management is evolving in several other emerging economies within Asia and it is becoming an important part of their growth in development. The focus for this year is to build on that. Now that we know how important it has been for other countries, we’re now focusing on what do we need to do in Mongolia to improve the quality of project management.
The focus here is not just on tools or techniques, but it is also on the mindset or the attitude of working with people, of how do they approach looking at their projects, how do they analyze them, how they visualize where that project is going. One part of this is awareness building: What do they need to learn? What do they need to understand for people for to effectively manage their projects. The second part is focusing on technical components: What are the skills that required? What are Mongolians good at? The focus is on improving project management within Mongolia.
We also want to expand their ideas, a lot of people think of project management as either something related to mining, to construction or something related to government. In reality, it relates to everything. You can use it in business and finance, you can use it in advertisement: how you organize your marketing promotion campaigns. NGO`s can use project management for organizing their projects, running more effectively. Schools can use project management, universities here undergoing changes on how they are delivering their curriculum in new ways. Project management is very useful tool when speaking with universities here by trying to help them and the people that are in charge to do better structure the processes for themselves, better use of resources and the capacities they have.
That`s why you decided that capacity building is important?
-Focus on capacity building is not just focus on what’s been done in the past. But focusing on how do you make it better an how do you move ahead to the future. What do project managers in Mongolia learn in order to be able to manage projects more effectively.
What issues are going to be discussed in this capacity building session?
-We are focusing on two different streams. We are running two conferences in parallel. One of them is to be focusing on mining and construction. Because lot of issues and concerns they have are very similar. The second stream we re focusing on is the service industry: banks, consultants, NGOs and IT and software. Because they are focusing on more intangible projects as they are going through their process. When are looking at mining and construction field, we are focusing on things like scheduling and procurement, how to schedule your purchasing to make it more effective. We also look at things like human resource, how to manage your labor pool and your expertise within the country to use them more effectively.
We are looking at soft skills area, more looking at human resource component how you manage the people that are going to be managed within the project, how do you work with them on those areas. How do project managers manage stakeholders like government agencies. If are working for a bank or you are working as an NGO you are much more influenced by outside organizations, so how do you manage those relationships that they don’t cause issues in your project. And still of course, we will look at scheduling, project finance and how they run those effectively.
So the focus on the first day of the conference is to give general overviews and short concise sessions. There will be about sixteen sessions for both streams on the first day.
On the second day, it is much more like a traditional workshop focused on delivering practical skills. We will be doing one and half hour sessions focusing on specific issues within project management related to Mongolia. It is much targeted on day two.
More on the presenters during the two-day sessions?
-We are still finalizing our speakers. What we are trying to do is get a mix of presenter. Last year, we have presenters from Australia, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong as well as Mongolia. This year, we are trying to do a similar thing, because as the event is a Mongolian conference we also have representatives of different chapters, different parts of Asia that are participating, so we will have participants from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.
We want these people to present at some of the sessions to bring their expertise from outside and provide different perspectives from places where project management is more established. We are balancing that with bringing in some Mongolian presenters, some from universities that are teaching and people working in project management here. We are looking at Mongolians who successfully delivered projects here in Mongolia either within Mongolian companies or working with international organizations. We’re hoping to have a sixty percent foreign and forty percent Mongolian mix of presenters.
We are also going to be offering couple sessions in Mongolia. The goal is to eventually working to have half of presenters speaking Mongolian half of them are coming from other places. We are looking to have more and more Mongolians in the next several years.
You were here for last six months in Mongolia as PMI Chapter?
-We originally started working on PMI back in 2012 was with the initial request to develop a headquarters and an interest in establishing chapter in Mongolia. We started operating as a chapter about two years ago. We were officially sanctioned, which means approved as an NGO by Mongolian Government, but also approved by PMI global as a legitimate chapter so we had some strict criteria we had to meet. We were sanctioned last June; actually it will be first official anniversary at the conference this year. But we have been operating as a probationary chapter for two and half years now.
How about the participants to the conference? Is it PMI members only or anyone interested can attend as well?
-The conferences are open to anyone who wants to participate. We promoting to and inviting as many people as we can. Last year we had 260 people who expressed interest to participate. We are having 160 participants for the first year of this conference. We were very pleased with it and PMI Global was very impressed.
You did not expect it?
-No, usually when a new chapter holds their first conference they are struggling to get 50 people. We actually had more people on that conference than Taiwan had which has been around for over 20 years. So, there were very impressive numbers that came out of Mongolia. The way we structured and promoted the conference last year is actually now being used as model for other new Asian chapters; how they should be looking at how they will be working with new chapters and new conferences.
Actually, we have Asia Pacific conference next week. Our representatives from Mongolia to be there and are presenting about our conference last year to all of the Asia Pacific Chapters as a model of best practice. Even though Mongolia has only been within the PMI Family for officially a year, we are already being seen as visionaries and good leaders in bringing in new ideas and new prospects for how to implement project management in emerging economies.
So people find it very important.
-Yes and it makes it easier to us to attract interesting foreign speakers, so we trying to see who we can bring in and we are hoping to have really interesting group of people. A month before the conference we will announce final list of speakers. We want to make sure we are not just bringing people who can talk and lecture. We want people who actually have project experience. We are being very targeted to deliver solutions to the participants, not just presenters who can talk about the projects that they have been working on. They are to present a part of their project and explain why it worked well and what were the steps or tools that they used to ensure that success, and be able to transfer that information to participants of the workshop. So, the more people who participate the more knowledge and information they have to share.
Where will be the conference held?
-The conference is to be held at Blue Sky Hotel. Blue Sky has been very helpful in accommodating monthly meetings and courses. But we find it a very nice venue in promoting Mongolian organization.
I understand that only English speakers can attend this conference and workshop?
-Yes for now this is one of the big challenges we face. Finding the right people to present. We do recognize that one of the limitations we have is that of foreign presenters and the language becomes an issue. Therefore it is part of our focus to build a pool of Mongolian project managers to speak at the consecutive conferences in the future. There will be few sessions presented in Mongolian. There will be a few sessions that will be translated as we go through from English to Mongolian. But for the most part yes, it is geared at least an intermediate level English speaker, who is interested in coming and participating and picking up some information.
We have been finding that even with Mongolian organizations that we speak to who are looking at some training and some mentorship, they usually have at least a few people in the organization that have strong language skill that we send out that information and bring it back to their organizations. I about four to five years look at a primarily Mongolian conference with some English or foreign content.
How many members do you have and how much PMI Mongolia developed?
-There are two levels of membership within PMI. We have official PMI members that are registered with PMI international, global registration, and who also belongs to the chapter, we have around a hundred of those. We have another 1oo participants that participate in our events such as our monthly meetings and attend to workshops, they will also be attending the conference. Overall we have over 200 people involved in different aspects within the chapter. Our Executives are all Mongolian, except for me, which is nice, and there are 11 volunteers donating their time to run the PMI chapter and the workshops, an important part of what we do. We strongly encourage our members to use our volunteer activities as opportunities to practice their project management skills. Especially our international members are strongly encouraged to volunteer their time and share their experience and information to help with these activities.
What kind of misunderstanding is mostly spread among Mongolians in regards with Project Management?
-The interesting thing with Mongolians already have the basic understanding of what they have to do. The real issue we end up focusing on and the types of questions we are asked is more on how to structure the work process, how to sequence different things like scheduling and the sequencing of tasks within project, how do you prioritize different areas and forecasting of project, where is it going. They are mostly not sure how to structure the project or the process of bringing a project together. Another aspect is timing of the project components. These are the main questions people are asking in regards with project management.
Could you name some of the Mongolian speakers?
-We have not finalized the Mongolian speakers list, but we are looking for heads of companies of Mongolia, senior government officials to be speakers as we go through. Also, we are looking at some larger projects within Mongolia and someone in project management at key positions.
What are the next planned events in the future?
-We run workshops and monthly training and that is to continue. We are now in process of developing our courses and trainings to be delivered the Mongolian. So in April there will be a first all Mongolian introduction course to project management based on the PMI system. So this will be the first process that we are going through. Once this conference is over we are planning moving into planning our next one.
The other thing we are looking at is expanding and focusing on certification, so we are hoping to run a Project Management Professional certification exam in June of this year, which will be first offered in Mongolia. We will be doing and exam every six months, so probably the next group will be in December. Earlier this year, we planned to certify 20 and 30 project managers so that we can have more people to teach at our courses and trainings.
We are also delivering courses and lectures to the university students such as MUST and IFE on the benefits of the project management and how relates to their field of study. We are talking into two universities to incorporate the Project management courses and they are very interested in incorporating that into their curriculum.
You are establishing partnerships with universities, so what about the Government organizations?
-They are definitely interested in project management. Part of our concern we have now is our capacity to deal with their need since we are only two years old and we are still setting ourselves up. We have some interesting preliminary discussion with certain groups within government. Also some of our members are working within Government agencies and we have done presentations to groups that represent the government employees. We have not at this point felt comfortable to approach and say that we want to do this and at this point we are not ready to take on that role and be able to work with government. But definitely it is something that we are looking to in long term, how can we promote an effective project management within the government.
Project Management Institute (PMI) and Project Management Institute Mongolia Chapter to organize its Second Annual International Conference & Workshop on Project Manage under the theme of ‘Capacity Building for the Future" at Blue Sky Tower during June 5-6, 2015.
We interviewed with Secretary General and Executive Director of Project Management Institute Mongolia Chapter Mr.Marc A. Tassé.
Why did you decide to organize your second annual conference and workshop?
-The first year’s of conference was an important component of promoting and making people aware of the different aspects of project management and how it relates to different government projects, private projects and NGO projects that are happening here. We wanted to give people the opportunity over two days to see what exactly project management is and hear from speakers running projects within Mongolia effectively and foreign speakers talking about what are the potential opportunities here in Mongolia.
Running conferences is one of the core requirements and one of the main purposes of having Project Management International Mongolia Chapter. It is our mandate to run an annual conference in Mongolia to provide an opportunity for learning.
Can you tell me the different sides of this conference, as the topic is capacity building?
-Last year`s conference, we focused on project management in emerging economies. This focus was to show the participants that project management is evolving in several other emerging economies within Asia and it is becoming an important part of their growth in development. The focus for this year is to build on that. Now that we know how important it has been for other countries, we’re now focusing on what do we need to do in Mongolia to improve the quality of project management.
The focus here is not just on tools or techniques, but it is also on the mindset or the attitude of working with people, of how do they approach looking at their projects, how do they analyze them, how they visualize where that project is going. One part of this is awareness building: What do they need to learn? What do they need to understand for people for to effectively manage their projects. The second part is focusing on technical components: What are the skills that required? What are Mongolians good at? The focus is on improving project management within Mongolia.
We also want to expand their ideas, a lot of people think of project management as either something related to mining, to construction or something related to government. In reality, it relates to everything. You can use it in business and finance, you can use it in advertisement: how you organize your marketing promotion campaigns. NGO`s can use project management for organizing their projects, running more effectively. Schools can use project management, universities here undergoing changes on how they are delivering their curriculum in new ways. Project management is very useful tool when speaking with universities here by trying to help them and the people that are in charge to do better structure the processes for themselves, better use of resources and the capacities they have.
That`s why you decided that capacity building is important?
-Focus on capacity building is not just focus on what’s been done in the past. But focusing on how do you make it better an how do you move ahead to the future. What do project managers in Mongolia learn in order to be able to manage projects more effectively.
What issues are going to be discussed in this capacity building session?
-We are focusing on two different streams. We are running two conferences in parallel. One of them is to be focusing on mining and construction. Because lot of issues and concerns they have are very similar. The second stream we re focusing on is the service industry: banks, consultants, NGOs and IT and software. Because they are focusing on more intangible projects as they are going through their process. When are looking at mining and construction field, we are focusing on things like scheduling and procurement, how to schedule your purchasing to make it more effective. We also look at things like human resource, how to manage your labor pool and your expertise within the country to use them more effectively.
We are looking at soft skills area, more looking at human resource component how you manage the people that are going to be managed within the project, how do you work with them on those areas. How do project managers manage stakeholders like government agencies. If are working for a bank or you are working as an NGO you are much more influenced by outside organizations, so how do you manage those relationships that they don’t cause issues in your project. And still of course, we will look at scheduling, project finance and how they run those effectively.
So the focus on the first day of the conference is to give general overviews and short concise sessions. There will be about sixteen sessions for both streams on the first day.
On the second day, it is much more like a traditional workshop focused on delivering practical skills. We will be doing one and half hour sessions focusing on specific issues within project management related to Mongolia. It is much targeted on day two.
More on the presenters during the two-day sessions?
-We are still finalizing our speakers. What we are trying to do is get a mix of presenter. Last year, we have presenters from Australia, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong as well as Mongolia. This year, we are trying to do a similar thing, because as the event is a Mongolian conference we also have representatives of different chapters, different parts of Asia that are participating, so we will have participants from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.
We want these people to present at some of the sessions to bring their expertise from outside and provide different perspectives from places where project management is more established. We are balancing that with bringing in some Mongolian presenters, some from universities that are teaching and people working in project management here. We are looking at Mongolians who successfully delivered projects here in Mongolia either within Mongolian companies or working with international organizations. We’re hoping to have a sixty percent foreign and forty percent Mongolian mix of presenters.
We are also going to be offering couple sessions in Mongolia. The goal is to eventually working to have half of presenters speaking Mongolian half of them are coming from other places. We are looking to have more and more Mongolians in the next several years.
You were here for last six months in Mongolia as PMI Chapter?
-We originally started working on PMI back in 2012 was with the initial request to develop a headquarters and an interest in establishing chapter in Mongolia. We started operating as a chapter about two years ago. We were officially sanctioned, which means approved as an NGO by Mongolian Government, but also approved by PMI global as a legitimate chapter so we had some strict criteria we had to meet. We were sanctioned last June; actually it will be first official anniversary at the conference this year. But we have been operating as a probationary chapter for two and half years now.
How about the participants to the conference? Is it PMI members only or anyone interested can attend as well?
-The conferences are open to anyone who wants to participate. We promoting to and inviting as many people as we can. Last year we had 260 people who expressed interest to participate. We are having 160 participants for the first year of this conference. We were very pleased with it and PMI Global was very impressed.
You did not expect it?
-No, usually when a new chapter holds their first conference they are struggling to get 50 people. We actually had more people on that conference than Taiwan had which has been around for over 20 years. So, there were very impressive numbers that came out of Mongolia. The way we structured and promoted the conference last year is actually now being used as model for other new Asian chapters; how they should be looking at how they will be working with new chapters and new conferences.
Actually, we have Asia Pacific conference next week. Our representatives from Mongolia to be there and are presenting about our conference last year to all of the Asia Pacific Chapters as a model of best practice. Even though Mongolia has only been within the PMI Family for officially a year, we are already being seen as visionaries and good leaders in bringing in new ideas and new prospects for how to implement project management in emerging economies.
So people find it very important.
-Yes and it makes it easier to us to attract interesting foreign speakers, so we trying to see who we can bring in and we are hoping to have really interesting group of people. A month before the conference we will announce final list of speakers. We want to make sure we are not just bringing people who can talk and lecture. We want people who actually have project experience. We are being very targeted to deliver solutions to the participants, not just presenters who can talk about the projects that they have been working on. They are to present a part of their project and explain why it worked well and what were the steps or tools that they used to ensure that success, and be able to transfer that information to participants of the workshop. So, the more people who participate the more knowledge and information they have to share.
Where will be the conference held?
-The conference is to be held at Blue Sky Hotel. Blue Sky has been very helpful in accommodating monthly meetings and courses. But we find it a very nice venue in promoting Mongolian organization.
I understand that only English speakers can attend this conference and workshop?
-Yes for now this is one of the big challenges we face. Finding the right people to present. We do recognize that one of the limitations we have is that of foreign presenters and the language becomes an issue. Therefore it is part of our focus to build a pool of Mongolian project managers to speak at the consecutive conferences in the future. There will be few sessions presented in Mongolian. There will be a few sessions that will be translated as we go through from English to Mongolian. But for the most part yes, it is geared at least an intermediate level English speaker, who is interested in coming and participating and picking up some information.
We have been finding that even with Mongolian organizations that we speak to who are looking at some training and some mentorship, they usually have at least a few people in the organization that have strong language skill that we send out that information and bring it back to their organizations. I about four to five years look at a primarily Mongolian conference with some English or foreign content.
How many members do you have and how much PMI Mongolia developed?
-There are two levels of membership within PMI. We have official PMI members that are registered with PMI international, global registration, and who also belongs to the chapter, we have around a hundred of those. We have another 1oo participants that participate in our events such as our monthly meetings and attend to workshops, they will also be attending the conference. Overall we have over 200 people involved in different aspects within the chapter. Our Executives are all Mongolian, except for me, which is nice, and there are 11 volunteers donating their time to run the PMI chapter and the workshops, an important part of what we do. We strongly encourage our members to use our volunteer activities as opportunities to practice their project management skills. Especially our international members are strongly encouraged to volunteer their time and share their experience and information to help with these activities.
What kind of misunderstanding is mostly spread among Mongolians in regards with Project Management?
-The interesting thing with Mongolians already have the basic understanding of what they have to do. The real issue we end up focusing on and the types of questions we are asked is more on how to structure the work process, how to sequence different things like scheduling and the sequencing of tasks within project, how do you prioritize different areas and forecasting of project, where is it going. They are mostly not sure how to structure the project or the process of bringing a project together. Another aspect is timing of the project components. These are the main questions people are asking in regards with project management.
Could you name some of the Mongolian speakers?
-We have not finalized the Mongolian speakers list, but we are looking for heads of companies of Mongolia, senior government officials to be speakers as we go through. Also, we are looking at some larger projects within Mongolia and someone in project management at key positions.
What are the next planned events in the future?
-We run workshops and monthly training and that is to continue. We are now in process of developing our courses and trainings to be delivered the Mongolian. So in April there will be a first all Mongolian introduction course to project management based on the PMI system. So this will be the first process that we are going through. Once this conference is over we are planning moving into planning our next one.
The other thing we are looking at is expanding and focusing on certification, so we are hoping to run a Project Management Professional certification exam in June of this year, which will be first offered in Mongolia. We will be doing and exam every six months, so probably the next group will be in December. Earlier this year, we planned to certify 20 and 30 project managers so that we can have more people to teach at our courses and trainings.
We are also delivering courses and lectures to the university students such as MUST and IFE on the benefits of the project management and how relates to their field of study. We are talking into two universities to incorporate the Project management courses and they are very interested in incorporating that into their curriculum.
You are establishing partnerships with universities, so what about the Government organizations?
-They are definitely interested in project management. Part of our concern we have now is our capacity to deal with their need since we are only two years old and we are still setting ourselves up. We have some interesting preliminary discussion with certain groups within government. Also some of our members are working within Government agencies and we have done presentations to groups that represent the government employees. We have not at this point felt comfortable to approach and say that we want to do this and at this point we are not ready to take on that role and be able to work with government. But definitely it is something that we are looking to in long term, how can we promote an effective project management within the government.