I had the great pleasure of attending the 5th Annual Project Management Australia Conference and the 6th Annual SEPG Australia Conference 2008 in Melbourne earlier in the week.

These two conferences are now held together in the one venue so that delegates from each can meet and get a wider choice of papers and presentations. Some of the keynotes are joint, as is the Conference Dinner. The beauty of this combination is being able to choose from some quite diverse discussions and papers. I had two presentations to make - one on a refereed paper (The Factors Contributing to Project Success - paper and presentation) that I developed as a paper for my DPM a while back. The other was a presentation jointly authored by myself and Graham Durant-Law, on analysing a program using Business Network Analysis (BNA) techniques (Understanding the Complexity of Program Management).

When I attend conferences, I always tend to get something out of them. It was in Singapore at a conference some years ago, I learnt this great Chinese proverb. I can't vouch for the exact words, but it went something like this:

"I threw some rocks into a cave and pulled out a few pieces of jade".

My papers and presentations are the "rocks", but the pieces of jade are the "gems" I got in return. This conference was no different. I chucked in some rocks and got a few gems back!!

Before I go into some of the gems I got out of it, I would like to offer some general observations.

Overall, I think the co-conference is a great idea. But there are a few challenges and none of them detract from the co-conference concept.

One of the challenges I suspect from my chats with a few people at the conference and from my experience at other events, is that it is an easy transition from the software/systems engineering perspective to move into a project management forum, because project management is so much a part of software/systems engineering. But the other way around is problematic. If a project manager has experience in the software, defence or aerospace industries, then software/systems engineering isn't so foreign. But if you are a project manager in say construction or civil engineering, then going to a software/systems engineering presentation at a conference means you can be confronted with gobbledygook.

A few years ago I presented at a project management conference in New Delhi where, because of a couple of conversations I had over coffee and meals, I became interested in the understanding practitioners and academics in the project management world had of systems engineering and requirements management principles. Many of the delegates were in the civil engineering and construction industry. Few had heard of systems engineering, fewer still of the CMMI. Some used requirements analysis but that was also a rarity. What am I saying here? For people to get value, I suspect there needs to be aspects of each of the two main subject areas - project management and software/systems engineering - that either can attend. I suspect that PMOz/SEPG got this balance about right, particularly with some of their joint keynotes. But I also suspect that an offering of "systems engineering basics" for project managers may perhaps be useful - more so than "project management basics" for systems engineers (although I do note there were some interesting workshops suitable for either stream). Indeed, I am a great believer that knowledge areas like requirements management are fundamental to any project of any type/genre.

The other observation I would make is the relative dearth of academic/refereed papers. I am undecided as to whether this is a good or bad thing. Perhaps it is good because the conference gets a wealth of real life experiences as presentations and both conferences are more practitioner than theoretical. Perhaps it is not desirable because the academic profession can lead new techniques and methods. I guess it also comes down to supply and demand. I also suspect that a conference more weighted toward academic papers than practitioner presentations would be detrimental to the conferences. So what would be the balance?
Well, I note that taking the two conferences together, there were six streams with a seventh being workshops/case studies in the PMOz part. Perhaps a worthwhile objective would be to have a single stream for the combined conference for refereed academic papers. This might be accompanied by a properly put together electronic journal published by the combined conference. I have no doubt this would be well received and would assist in that integration of theory and practice so necessary for the professions to progress. Perhaps a thought there for the organisers if it hasn't already been considered?

But overall, I hope there is more to come. Well done to the organisers and EventCorp for the professional conference management.

In my next blog, I will look at some of the "pieces of jade" I got from the conference.