"It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else", a quote from someone called Erma Bombeck, a writer from the States. That's exactly what the PMO Dreamboat was all about last month.
The idea was we would get about 30 PMO professionals together on a boat on the Thames one evening in July. This boat also sold beer and chips which I think are essential ingredients for any PMO person to set about dreaming.
But not just any old dreams. Here was the idea:
So we thought, the PMO Flashmob is a PMO community, so why not have a chat about our dream jobs with each other and find out what we might need to get there or be inspired by someone else’s dream to think differently about our own? I think we could come away with a lot of great ideas about our careers in PMO which is of course the aim behind PMO Flashmob.
We can't recreate the conversations here in the post that were had that night but what we can do is share some of the dream clouds that were created that night. Here's the first to get us started;
As someone who has only been working on projects for a year, I’m full of questions, eager to make this my career, and am curious to meet other PMO professionals. Saying that, I almost didn’t go to my first PMO Flashmob event, which my calendar reminded me was happening later the same day. I was a little nervous, and imagined I’d be out of my depth. I was proved wrong though!
I arrived early and started speaking to another young professional, getting to know their background, and finding out how often they’d been coming to the Flashmob. Once the room started to fill out, Lindsay introduced us to the group activity – designed to develop perspectives, objectively look at our current roles, and to see if any patterns could be identified from them. This helped to move us around the room and gave us an easy opener to talk to new people.
Luckily for me one of the people that came along was working in the same sector as a job which I’ve recently been shortlisted for. This was an invaluable opportunity to better understand the culture of this particular environment, and to ask for an insider’s opinion and perspectives. After about 2 hours we had covered everything that I’d wanted to find out and had swapped contact details so that I could be sent more information.
Last night's PMO Flashmob was a great success. A mix of returning flashmobbers and some new faces. We decided for this month to return to our roots, just get in a pub and do some networking over drinks and nibbles.
I think its good to try and help people network, especially while you're waiting for the first drink to kick in before people feel chatty.
So this time we decided to go for the Four Corners of PMO Networking.
Which is basically four different types of networking 'devices' in each of the corners of the room :) Corner one, we had the good old fashioned speed networking table.
In the other we had a simple question and answer corner. Pick up a question and then chat about it.
Some of the questions:
Last night's PMO Flashmob took place in a little place that wouldn't look out of place in a Dickens novel.
The Samuel Pepys bar on Stew Lane looks out across the Thames to the Tate Modern, certainly a photogenic spot! So against a true London backdrop PMO professionals from across the capital came together over a pint or two to chat about their worldSome of the themes for the evening included reinvention, skills and competencies, job hunting and career values. Here's just a flavour of the conversations, I can't hope to capture the whole thing but it should give you a feel of the type of conversations that happen.
