President’s Message

Dear PM Practioners,

Welcome to first editon of Synergy for this year – 2020!!

As I look back at last year, it has been quite a happening year for the chapter. We had a few “Meet & Greet” events for our new chapter members. This series showed an increasing trend of participation with each event and reached the peak of 54 attendees in one of the events. Similarly our AGM event has also become a big success wherein participations over 4‐years has increased from 35 to nearly 135‐140 approx. participants. The last AGM was a full day event with external speakers brought in on interesting and diverse topics for chapter members benefit.

As part of our thoughts to try and give back to community, we also signed MoU’s with two NGO’s to contribute and support their iniƟaƟves namely:

Esha – People for the Blind

Under the initiative launched last year, we saw nearly 40 of our members signing up for the Esha initiative. Objective of the initiatitive was to research on non‐utilizaƟtion of various online / free knowledge resources by Indian population inspite of availability of plenty of online, free knowledge resources available. These includes but not limited to DLI, Esha’s Online Library, Sugamya Pustakalaya, National Digital Library etc but 70% of India’s population continues to remain impacted as 'Knoweledge Have Nots'.

This is not an issue of adoption, poor adoption is the result of poor product design. These products have been designed with all knowledge resources based on user behavior of the 'knowledge haves' –people like us. Which is why project aŌer project is failing. Through this research, idea is to discover the knowledge acquisition behavior of the knowledge 'have nots'.

Robin Hood Army (Planning to launch this initiative formally in Q1, 2020)

By signing this MoU, RHA & PMI NIC are committing their intentions and efforts to work together for promotion of global best practices on Project Management and also on opportunities where in members of PMI North India Chapter can volunteer alongside volunteers of Robin Hood Army for their food collection and distribution drives.

On a separate note, we were able to deliver much appreciated events in different formats at MNIT Jaipur, CapGemini Noida, Best Koki, Global Companies Approach to Successful Project Delivery with a speaker from Australia etc. The year culminated with a grand celebrations of PMI 50 Year party with some important insightful sessions taken by Mr. Sanjay, Project Director, Medanta and Mr. Srini, MD PMI India. We also launched new website of the Chapter as per new PMI guidelines, incorporating our chapter’s new logo – all the work was done in‐house by chapter’s past president Pritam Dutt.

Additionally we have also now become Technical Committee Member of CII‐IGBC (Indian Green Building Council) and look forward to contributing our knowledge and skills for advancement of their objectives in the best interest of the nation. I personally attended their kickoff meeting last year in Delhi for “Net Zero Water” initiative.

Within the chapter we were able to successfully conduct elections to the chapter board with three positions going to elections. Following new directors joined in—

VP Marketing and Outreach — Sunita Gupta

VP Governance & Policy—Jay Kumar

VP Finance — Arshpreet Kaur

Additionally we carried forward finalization of teams below them by appointing following 10 Managers and AVP’s under respective VP’s

And now we are going to announce soon launch of chapter webinar series with a cross section of speakers from across industries and topics for the benefit of our members especially from remote locations who have not been able to attend physical events. Watch out for that announcement for joining as attendee / speaker.

Lastly culmination this note with best & colorful wishes for upcoming festival of Holi in March 2020!!

Best Regards,

Manoj