5:30 - 8:30PM

Holiday Inn, 265 Lakeside Avenue (Route 20), Marlboro, MA, just off Route 495

Becker College

Bill Duncan

Product vs. Project Management

Joint Meeting with PDMA

Defining and Measuring Project Success

The movie "Titanic" was a fabulous box office success, but its filming was completed late and over budget. Was it a success? This session will help you get a handle on the difference between product success and project management success, and will also show you how to create and maintain success measures throughout the project life cycle.

William R. Duncan is a principal of Project Management Partners, a project management consulting and training firm headquartered in Lexington, MA USA. He was Director of Standards for the Project Management Institute, Inc. (USA) from 1992-1998 and has been Director of Standards for the American Society for Advancement of Project Management (asapm) since it was founded in 2000.

Mr. Duncan has over thirty years of management and consulting experience including five years with a major international consulting firm. He was the primary author of the 1994 and 1996 versions of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, the most widely used project management standard in the world. In addition, his "process model" of project management was used to organize ISO 10006, Guidelines for quality in project management.

He continues to support a variety of volunteer efforts in support of the project management profession. Mr. Duncan is a member of the directorate for the Operational Level Coordination Initiative (OLCI) which includes representatives from major corporations, key academic institutions with project management degree programs, and all of the major professional associations. He recently developed the initial draft of Performance-Based Competency Standards for Project Managers for the Global Working Group on Project Management Personnel.

Mr. Duncan has also worked as an expert witness on project management practices for a major USA law firm. He speaks widely throughout the world on topics such as Organizational Competence in Project Management™, Project Dynamics: the Law of Unintended Consequences, Project Recovery, Project Portfolio Management, Project Risk Management, and Performance-Based Competency Standards.

He has helped clients in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia improve their organizational competence in project management. Major clients include Camp Dresser & McKee, Codelco, Entergy Corporation, First Data Resources, FT Interactive Data, Guangdong Development Bank, Investors Group, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Manitoba Telephone, Polaroid, PSM Russia, Schlumberger, Shenzhen Cyberway, Sybase, and Texas Instruments.

He is a 1970 graduate of Brown University in Providence, RI and has done post-graduate work at Boston University and Northeastern. Specific, recent consulting engagements include:

• Development of a project manager competency model and career ladder for a large engineering consulting firm. The competency model was used to ensure that the company's most critical projects were being managed by their best project managers. The career ladder included criteria for promotion as well as a recognition and reward system that was integrated with the firm's personnel processes.
• Facilitation of a project start-up workshop for a consumer products company. The workshop extended over a two week period and included 25 people. As a result of the workshop, the organization was able to cut nearly two months off the expected project duration - saving nearly $1,000,000.

Mr. Duncan has also developed numerous training programs including:

• Mastering Modern Project Management, a three day introduction to project management that uses the participants' own projects for casework to ensure that they can use what they learn immediately back on the job.
• Project Leadership and Team Building, a two day program that helps participants develop the personal and professional skills (motivation, feedback, delegation, others) needed to lead a project team.
• Project Risk Management, a two day program that takes participants from identifying and describing project risks through evaluating alternative responses.