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A Word from your Publisher

Publisher's Letter, December 2012

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Parent Category: Publisher's Letters Category: A Word from your Publisher
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Written by Judith W. Umlas Hits: 272

Publisher’s Letter:

Can you believe that another year is coming to an end? Looking back, it has gone so fast, and yet moment by moment each project was a major challenge and a wonderful accomplishment. I think of all that IIL put into International Project Management Day 2012, for example. Were you one of the 40,000 people who attended either the live or the on-demand event, which was filled with videos from an amazing assemblage of thought leaders from around the globe? It was such an inspirational day that one participant in the big event named Wolfgang Fahr PMP® of Hewlett Packard GmbH wrote the following:

 

Dear IPMDay Team,

This day was a highlight, and thanks for the opportunity to join further sessions in the coming weeks. As a big thanks from my side, please find here an instrumental music production which was inspired for me by that unique day, so I developed this for the project management community. Enjoy!

Kind Regards / Mit freundlichen Grüssen

Well, Wolfgang, we have enjoyed it so much that we are including a link to your composition here (https://soundcloud.com/iil-publishing/pmi-2012-by-wolfgang-from-ipm), and would like to invite our readers to submit lyrics about International Project Management Day to go with your inspiring music! Wolfgang will help us judge the submissions, and there will be a prize to the best lyricist. Then, if we have any great vocalists for the piece among our subscribers....

I find Wolfgang’s contribution amazing and great fun! That’s the way we like to have it at allPM – amazing content, and fun and engaging results! Now here’s another email I received from an allPM member in Costa Rica. She wrote in response to the great desire I expressed to have our members engaged in the content of the web portal. This is what she said:

I have been a subscriber for 7 years and...Back in April 2012 I got my PMP®, and yeah I am an actual PMI member and PMI Costa Rica Chapter member,  but most of my tricks and tips and much of my style as a PM I have gotten from allPM.com. It is great that besides the little feedback we subscribers sometimes provide, you guys have continued to delight us with your books, articles and amazing knowledge.

This wonderful member hit the nail on the head: “With the little feedback we subscribers sometimes provide…” Well, how about making it your New Year’s Resolution to contribute more to allPM.com? That would make our editorial team very happy. This member gave us five sets of Tips of the Day she is willing to write, but she was the only one who responded. So here is the form again – this time, please, fill it out, and send it to me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and/or to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . We would love to include your contributions to our website and the Tips of the Day.

This month, we have a great selection of articles that will wrap up the year and ignite your mind during the holidays.

We have a wonderful contribution from Harry Rever, one of our favorite Six Sigma experts, who has the amazing ability to break complicated subjects down into clear, concise lessons that are accessible to anyone. This month he provides us with a roadmap for improving process. An article on the perils of biases in project management by Stephen Jenner, whose wonderful British accent makes his even more wonderful content a real treat to read. And for those of you who are resolving to read some challenging but worthwhile “stuff” in the New Year, the article by Carl Belack will kick start this resolution for you, by looking at the future of organizational change and how project managers can adapt alongside their organization.

In addition, we have the second installment of the 11 Grateful Leader profiles excerpted from my book Grateful Leadership: How To Engage All Your People and Achieve Superior Results that I hope will warm your heart as much as it did mine.  Also, we have part two of Dr. Kerzner’s How the Seven Deadly Sins Can Lead to Project Failure. The sin discussed this month is wrath, and why it is something to avoid in project management (and in those busy parking lots and stores during the holiday season).

Anyway, it’s been a great year for the growth of allPM.com and we look forward to continuing in this vein and developing much more with your help and support. Come “play” with us! We want and need your full participation.

Our editorial team – Vanessa Jean Innes, Associate Publisher, E. LaVerne Johnson, Founder, President and CEO of IIL, Dr. Harold Kerzner, Sr. Executive Director at IIL and I – all send you all our best wishes for wonderful holidays and a happy, healthy, wealthy and wise (with the help of the fresh, new, exciting content provided to you by allPM.com) New Year ahead.

 

Until the next time…

Judy Umlas, Publisher
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Publisher's Letter, August 14, 2012

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Parent Category: Publisher's Letters Category: A Word from your Publisher
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Written by Judith W. Umlas Hits: 492

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I do believe we are making newsletter publishing history with this edition of allPM Today!  Before I tell you how, I will first confess that when I think of project managers, I don’t immediately connect them with at least one of the two unusual topics of the month -- Spiritual Quotient. In spite of that, in this edition of the newsletter we have the guts and the gumption to focus on this area of project management skills that has not received a lot of attention! Here’s what we put in our Editorial Calendar as the theme for this edition a while back, and which helped draw in some truly amazing articles:

“EQ (Emotional Quotient) and more recently SQ (Spiritual Quotient) have become recognized as important tools in measuring, building, improving interpersonal skills as well as the ability to manage your projects and teams.”

And, of course, we all want these results for our projects, for our people and for our organizations. So, in this newsletter, we have the honor and the pleasure of having almost all of our ten articles focus on these topics. They have been written by thought leaders, trainers, authors and others who really want to bring us to the extraordinary place of connecting our potentially powerful purpose in life, with our work – in making our work be a reflection of who we are and what we stand for. We all want and need to know that we are making a difference. Once we know who we are and what is driving us in our work, these authors tell us, our SQ will soar. From my own experience, once I stumbled onto “The Power of Acknowledgment” as a focus for a book and many courses that now teach globally, my mission and my purpose became clear. As a result, so much else regarding my work and my projects then fell into place regarding the difference I wanted to, and knew I could make in the world.

So, thanks to all of you who were drawn to this unusual and powerful topic.  Contributors such as Greg Balestrero, former CEO of PMI and currently Strategic Advisor, Corporate Consciousness, Sustainability and Leadership; Alan Harpham, Chairman at the APM Group and co-author of the recently published  book The Spirit of Project Management (Advances in Project Management) and a host of others lead us down this very moving and fulfilling path. Each article “reached” your Publisher profoundly and purposefully with its message, and I hope you will explore your own Spiritual as well as Emotional Quotients as you read them.

Once you do, we would invite you to take the EQ Exam created by Institute for Health and Human Potential, as we don’t want you to lose sight of the importance of having a high EQ as well as SQ. Test your Emotional Intelligence right here, right now! Click on the following link and take the EQ Free Quiz: http://www.ihhp.com/?page=freeEQquiz. This is a great way to know what your EQ is and what are your potential areas of improvement. Yes, we all have at least one!J

In this edition of allPM Today, we are proud to announce the winner(s) of our PM Poetry contest! We received some delightful submissions and hope you will continue to send in your prolific project management poetry – to be compiled eventually into a book to be published by IIL Publishing, as soon as we have enough of them to constitute a book! So keep on creating these “PMPs” (Project Management Poems, in this case!J)

We are delighted to announce that the winner of our contest is Arun Lal, Consultant and Trainer, for his clever poem about Scope Creep. Congratulations, Arun! You are the lucky winner of a Kindle, fully loaded with IIL Publishing books! We would also like to give honorable mentions to Steve Blais and Anne Foley for the wonderful poems that they submitted, which also received positive feedback. They will be receiving autographed copies of my new book, Grateful Leadership: Using the Power of Acknowledgement to Engage all your People and Achieve Superior Results (feel free to visit www.GratefulLeadership.com to learn more about it) and we invite you to reread the poems that Arun, Anne and Steve wrote for us. You will find them HERE.

I have two more exciting news to share with you:

Facebook Page

We are happy to announce our official allPM Facebook Page. Please join our community HERE and “like” us! That way, you will see the latest news, announcements, contests and other games directly on your wall. It’s also a great place to do some networking and exchange with allPM members all over the globe!

EQ Contest

For the next contest, we would like you to use our Facebook page. All you have to do is to “like” us and then post 3 creative ideas on how to improve EQ and/or SQ at work. Share with our members what your secret is to engage, inspire people, or make them comprehend the purpose of their work or the contribution they can be making. Who knows? You may be the next winner of a Kindle!

So please let me know how wrong I am (if I am) when I confess that I don’t associate project managers with having high spiritual quotients – just like some of you “yelled” at me years ago when I said project managers don’t like poetry, that led to the whole PM Poetry movement, just to make me wrong and I loved that. I really do love to be wrong, in the interest of a good cause. I would also appreciate knowing more about your spiritual journeys and how they support your effectiveness as project managers. Please write to me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Until the next time…

Judy Umlas, Publisher

Publisher's Letter, March 2013

Publisher’s Letter, March

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

 

In this part of the world, Spring is here, and we are using “spring cleaning” as a metaphor for what we should all be doing, no matter what season it is in your part of the world!  Charanya Girish, PMP’s article explores the history of this tradition, and how to execute spring cleaning in both the personal and professional areas of our lives. I know I can really use the valuable information she provides to motivate myself, so I hope you will, too.  In addition, we have some great insights into how to clean up crises from Mounir Soudani, PMP and Jean-Roch Houillier, PMP. We hope you won’t ever need their excellent advice, but just in case, keep the article handy!

 

In addition, we have the next piece from Dr. Harold Kerzner’s series How the Seven Deadly Sins Can Lead to Project Failure, and this month’s topic is a juicy one: Greed. And when I think of what I might be greedy for, it is definitely for your contributions to allPM.com! That’s why we are asking what other “deadly sins” do you think could or should be added to the list, and why? If our editorial team AND Dr. Kerzner like it, you can win one of Dr. Kerzner’s outstanding books. So get busy and start collecting your Project Management Sins for everyone’s benefit!

 

Along with Spring usually comes sunshine…at least in the northern hemisphere, so we have included a special chapter from the latest book from IIL Publishing called Positive Leadership in Project Management by Frank P. Saladis, PMP,  my former Co-Publisher of this newsletter. It is fittingly entitled, “The Future’s So Bright, We Gotta Wear Shades.” Frank, we are proud of your contribution to the field of project management with your wonderful new book, and look forward to excerpting a few more chapters in future editions of allPM Today.

 

One more invitation to contribute to allPM.com for you all: we are considering starting a new feature which would be called something like Project Management Pleasures to include features like PM Crossword Puzzles (Frank Saladis used to contribute one every month), PM Poetry (we actually published a booklet of these and plan on a book eventually) and any other crazy/fun/funky ideas you can help us come up with. The column would be edited by our Associate Editor of allPM Today, Vanessa Innes.

 

So all in all,  we have some great articles this month, and I hope you enjoy this edition of allPM as much as you enjoy Springtime and cleaning out the cobwebs across both your work and personal life.  

 

Until the next time…

 

Judy Umlas, Publisher

 

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