Pride!

wimdegier
Proud

The wonderful theme of the Project Control Congress of PCO Kennis in Driebergen on the 2nd of February, was ‘Pride’. I gladly accepted the invitation to present at the congress.

As you might have read in my “about” page as Global Program Manager, I am responsible for several international projects. Next to that I have several roles within the International Project Management Association (IPMA). These great experiences give me quite some stories to be proud of!

I started to tell a personal story about my youth. I must have been about 10 years old. My Mother gave me one guilder to buy the famous traditional Dutch “bread with a croquette”. However, in front of the counter, I was not able to pronounce the word croquette as I stumbled a lot at that time. So I tried to order the bread with a cro…cro… cro…cro… cro… HAM! The result was losing my guilder and receiving bread with Ham (which I did not like at all) instead of a delicious croquette. At home I cried to my mom and decided that one day things will be different!

35 years later I was invited as keynote speaker in Boston at the Enterprise 2.0 congress for more than 1750 people in the room. Flying business towards Boston, being only 20 hours in the US and to present for such an audience gave me, as you can imagine, an enormous feeling of pride!

The next story was about my IPMA Project Excellence Award assessment involvement in Nanjing, China. This was an incredible story and resulted in the golden award at the IPMA World congress in Panama. I also explained the Project Excellence (PEB) model at high level.

The last story is the connection of my skydiving passion in relation to being a certified project manager. This movie explains it all.

Three key takeaways:

Afterwards I received nice feedback with quotes like “your story really touched me”, “the final movie was a perfect metaphor”, “I would really like to thank you for your story, as I stumble myself… this will help me a great deal!”