Project Management Office Hours

In this episode of Project Management Office Hours, Joe Pusz, PMO Joe previews an upcoming show topic, Project Management in everyday use beyond business boundaries. He provides a tease of future guest Rick Mason and his cross-country cycling trips. Joe also shares how he is using Project Management to help prepare for the 2018 Marine Corps Marathon and fundraising efforts for the Team Red, White, and Blue charity.
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During the main segment, Joe discusses current trends and insights in the project management industry with guests Danielle Holbrook Dunn from Pivotal Payments and Dana DiGerolami from THE PMO SQUAD. Danielle details the demands of maintaining adherence to Regulations, such as PCI, within the Payment Processing industry while delivering customer focused projects. She discusses the challenges of balancing expectations between internal stakeholders and customs when managing the Pivotal Payments Corporate PMO Project Portfolio.

Both Danielle and Dana add to a deep exchange on the need, value and challenges of selecting the proper Project Management Software solution. Dana explains how using an independent vendor such as THE PMO SQUAD and their PM Software selection toolkit can help navigate through the hundreds of choices PMOs face when selecting a software solution.

Jenn Tanabe is a seasoned project manager who oversees Vertical Measures’ project management team. She has nearly 10 years of digital marketing experience in strategy, content creation, SEO, amplification, lead nurture, and website development.

At Vertical Measures, Jenn’s proactive, supportive and upbeat approach to leading the project management team helps in delivering successful projects to their clients. In addition to leading her team, Jenn oversees the day-to-day team resource capacity and resource forecasting for the agency. She also project manages a few enterprise-level accounts, helping to plan, control scope, identify and mitigate risk, while effectively communicating with both her clients and her internal team.

Kim Essendrup solves problems. For the last 20+ years, he’s been a Project Manager, Program Manager, PMO manager and consultant. He had lead international infrastructure and M&A programs, and delivered project management training and coaching to domestic and international clients as a PMI Registered Education Provider.

He is one of the founding partners of Kolme Group, LLC, which was started by three PMO managers who grew so tired of the accepted “status quo” of poor Project and Portfolio Management solutions, that they teamed up to bring Data Driven PPM to portfolio managers everywhere.

In this episode of Project Management Office Hours, Joe Pusz, PMO Joe chats with David Dietz from Honeywell and Pete Stephens from Daicel Safety Systems.

The 3 have a great discussion on the differences of Project Management in Europe and Asia compared to how we run projects here in the US. David also talks in detail about his time in the Military and how that has influenced his civilian Project Management career.

Joe shares with the audience that sponsor, THE PMO SQUAD, operates a Veterans Project Management Mentoring Program in partnership with Vet2PM and Veterans2Work. The Program pairs Veterans seeking to transition to civilian PM careers with PMP who volunteer time to help mentor the Veterans.

We also discuss Project Management careers, how PMOs work in large organizations, and several other Project Management topics!

Kristen Call, for the love of technology, has over 20 years’ experience in the retail and payments technologies and has served in a variety of capacities. Achievement highlights include several patents and has been recognized by the Wall Street Journal and Nightline for entrepreneurial endeavors. Out of the ashes of her years of entrepreneurship she took her lessons achieved to continue to build a successful career in software implementations at corporations including NCR, American Express, Pier One and PetSmart. She is also the current residing president for IIBA’s local Phoenix chapter. She is honored to have the privileged of working with so many brilliant people.

Her expertise includes intangible assets such as team building, corporate culture disruption, applying the scientific method to project implementations, infusing agile techniques in waterfall environments, and creating the game of winning. Tangible assets include a degree in philosophy, sociology and a global MBA. She holds certificates as Scrum Master and Product Owner.

Carrie Van Sickle is a Sr. Program Manager with GE Digital. As a member of the Strategic Accounts Delivery team, Carrie is responsible for helping customers worldwide achieve desired outcomes through development and deployment of digital transformation strategies. Carrie received her PMP credential in 2007.

Before joining GE Digital in 2016, Carrie was with SAP in a variety of roles including five years as a Director for the Data Science & Analytics organization and several years on the commercial side of the business as a Services Sales Manager. Prior to SAP, she held positions with several Fortune 500 companies including leading global delivery for Amkor Technology and consulting for PricewaterhouseCoopers.

John Sievila is PMO Project Director for Cancer Treatment Centers of America. John is a graduate of University of North Dakota with a BSEE. As an accomplished Technology professional with extensive PMO experience in large-scale projects including Healthcare (PACS, HIS, RIS, etc.), John has successfully led large scale PMO driven projects and programs, including Professional Services organizations throughout his career.

Lynda Stanton began her career as a business analyst working on financial systems at Phoenix-based Apollo Education Group. After enjoying varied experience at Apollo, which included internal audit and playing a key role on a PMO for a $13M business transformation project, she moved into the consulting world. As an advisory consultant at PwC, Lynda led efforts to develop an adoption dashboard for a large cloud application implementation and ran the PMO for a $10M+ trade promotion system transformation.

This is the initial episode of Project Management Office Hours. Jill and Joe discuss how Project Management Leadership, the importance of Soft Skills and the importance of Project Management to assist organizations in delivering on strategic objectives.