Rebroadcast of Episode 280: How to get the Most out of Attending a Project Management Conference (Free)

Summary: This is a Rebroadcast The PMI Global Congress 2016 North America will take place at the end of September 2016 in San Diego. This video and the worksheet that goes with it will help you prepare and make the most out of attending the conference! Play Now: Sorry. Your browser cannot play this video. We project managers attend many conferences. And I remember quite clearly how disappointed I was after some of these project management conferences because I realized that I didn’t get as much out of them as I had hoped. So I decided that instead of continuing to hope for more success, I would have to plan for it. This video and the accompanying checklist contain my personal best practices for conference success. I hope that it will help you plan for a successful conference as well. Please feel free to share any improvements ideas with me in the comment section below. Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only.  Podcast Introduction Cornelius Fichtner: Hello and welcome to Episode # 280. This is the Project Management Podcast™ at www.pm-podcast.com and I'm Cornelius Fichtner. Welcome back. This episode is all about getting the most out of a project management conference and we have a checklist for you as well. The idea for this episode and the checklist came to me a few days ago when I signed up for one of PMI's Global Congresses. I invested about $2,500 in my 3-day attendance at the congress. That's the congress fee, the plane ticket, the hotel so I decided you know what, with so much money at stake here, $2,500 quite a bit of chunk of money, I want to make this a success. And so I decided to develop this checklist for you and for me because we project managers attend many conferences and I remember quite clearly how disappointed I was of some of these conferences because I realized I didn’t get as much out of them as I had hoped. So I decided instead of continuing to hope for more success, I would have to plan for it. This checklist contains my personal best practices for conference success and I really hope that it allows you to plan for a successful conference as well. And of course, this checklist is available for download on The PM Podcast™ website. Just go to www.pm-podcast.com, Episode #280 and you'll see a link to download it. For the rest of this episode, we are now going to go through this checklist together. It has 3 sections --- before the conference, during the conference and after the conference. Or because we are all project managers here, it's nothing but the plan-do-check-act cycle. And of course the first section of the checklist before the conference that corresponds to the planning portion of the plan-do-check-act cycle. Frankly if you want to stop right now, just download the checklist and work on it offline, I am not going to be angry at all because the checklist is quite self-explanatory but continuing to view this video to listen to this episode here will probably help you because I'm going to give you a lot of background information and insights and ideas. Alright then, let's get's started with planning our conference attendance. It will come as no surprise to you that the first thing we're going to have to do is we are going to have to define goals. Why are we planning or attending this conference? So describe what you hope to gain or learn at the conference. Do stay realistic and plan to be able to achieve only one or two goals maximum. If you say yourself, 7,8, 9, 10 goals then suddenly everything becomes important and when everything is important, nothing is really important anymore. As an example here personally whenever I attend a conference, I want to bring value to the listeners of The Project Management Podcast™ and I often achieve in various ways by recording episodes, by recording interviews right there live on site or just bringing home new ideas, business cards of guests I can invite in the future or episodes that I record on