Two current or former colleagues will join me at the PMI NorCal Symposium 2008 on September 3-4 at Stanford University.
My co-author of Project Sponsorship and close friend is Alfonso Bucero. 
All projects need an executive sponsor. Upper management support for projects consistently surfaces as a critical success factor and sets the pace for how an organization implements projects. However, organizations often do not spend the time and money to understand what sponsorship is, why doing it better is important, and how to improve. Alfonso Bucero, PMP, brings an international perspective to this challenge. As a senior project manager for HP services in Europe, he faced challenges in getting appropriate upper management support on client projects. He took the initiative to address stakeholder analysis, propose and establish a PMO, train sponsors on roles and responsibilities, and conduct project reviews: all focused on upgrading a culture that struggled to meet project expectations. Building upon these learnings, Alfonso now manages projects across Europe and Asia for BUCERO PM Consulting and writes “Crossing Borders” for PMI’s PM Network as a Contributing Editor.
Get tangible examples about business risks management and get prepared to implement them within organizations: or at least challenge the status quo and have something to propose, based upon successful implementations elsewhere. As a senior project manager at Visa and formerly at HP, practitioner and author Tom Kendrick, PMP, explores the connection between project risk management and program, portfolio, and enterprise risk management as well as shares experiences about what it takes to get results when lacking the requisite authority. These topics are the subject of the three books he’s authored. Tom and I worked together at the HP corporate Project Management Initiative. We both take pride in the work we did to lead the continuous improvement of project management across the company.
Be inspired: be challenged: transform!
Randy Englund, Englund Project Management Consultancy, www.englundpmc.com
I strongly believe that positive attitude is important for project success. I have been dealing with sad project managers who destroyed his/her team motivation step by step. I also defend the sentence “Today is a Good Day.”
I have seen a video clip of Alfonso where he talks about the 3 P’s for success: