Last month, I visited Malvern to speak on 'Making Risk Workshops Work' for the new APM Malvern and Worcester branch. The room was packed out with people who run risk workshops and we had a great time discussing the issues that come up and how to deal with them. You can see the key issues and a lot of great ideas here.

Funnily enough, an unforseen risk almost scuppered the meeting. The hotel where we were due to meet went bust the day before. Luckily the hotel next door honoured our booking. Wendy, the APM administrator, did an amazing job of contacting everyone. It was an interesting practical demonstration that risks are just that - uncertain events!

In the Gulf recently, I came across 'open budget' projects. This wasn't something I'd heard of before. It seems that, for a few organisations in some Middle Eastern countries, the project budget isn't always a constraint. These projects are known as 'open budget projects'.

Now before you all flock to the Middle East to this project nirvana where money isn't a constraint, listen carefully.

The person who told me about open budget projects was very unhappy about them. 'What could possibly be bad about having enough money to do whatever is needed?' you might ask. When I probed a bit deeper, I heard about projects where the requirements were not understood. Instead, the team would buy an expensive, complex, off the shelf system and, when it didn't work and wasn't used, a new project would kick off. I heard of one or two projects in their third or fourth iteration, without having produced anything useful for their end users.

Perhaps budgets are ...

I spent much of my summer pushing a wheelchair around after my other half, Malcolm, broke his achilles tendon in May. He's almost better now but, for a while, he was in plaster from foot to knee. It could have been worse, much worse: many achilles patients were in plaster from foot to hip, so unable to move or take a proper bath for six weeks. What a nightmare that would be!

So how do the doctors decide which patient will have to suffer the long plaster and which ones will have the (much easier to live  with) short plaster? Surely they would use the patient's medical history and work out which one would suit the patient's injury best... you'd hope so. But I was horrified to see a note stuck up in the plaster room. It was a list of consultant surgeons' names with the length of plaster that each preferred their patients to wear. Isn't that terrible? Had my husband seen a different consultant, he would have been in plaster up to his hip. No baths, no car trips (he's 6ft 2in ...

I'm just back from two conferences - presenting http://www.conferencecallsmadeeasy.com/ at the APM conference last week and chairing the PMI's International Project Management Day conference yesterday. Both were fun and informative. The fascinating thing was that the same theme came through very strongly from both conferences: it's people that make projects work, not processes or methodology. They must've been reading my newsletters! Not that I'm against methodolgy... but it just doesn't cut it alone.

A few weeks ago at the Programme Management special interest group (ProgM) in London, I heard a senior programme manager talk about the methodology most people use: PRIDE. Have you heard of that? PRojects In Deep Excrement. I thought that this was really rather funny... until I remembered the time when I had a project that was deep in it. It was incredibly stressful and not at all funny. I can remember it viv ...

Project Management today is seen as a development route to senior positions. So how do you develop tomorrow's project management leaders?
I spent Wednesday last week at Merrill Lynch at a conference looking at just that.

Here are some of the snippets I heard:

BAE Systems have a postgraduate certificate. This really focuses on understanding oneself and others before the core Project Management content. This is followed by a project at work to apply it all. Senior leaders are developed by coaching rather than courses. There were lots of questions around how to measure intangibles!

Geoff Reiss and Martin Price showed how Project Management has been seen to be all rules and process (eg PRINCE2 and PMBOK). However, great project managers are more than this. It is a bit like David Beckham - who doesn't just know the rules but is also a brilliant team player.
Geoff Reiss had a wonderful explanation of how process doesn't always ...