Right, I’m now going to stop posting stuff about how wonderful Arras were at Project Challenge and let you know how Project Challenge was 
For anyone who has never been to Project Challenge it’s a twice a year event dedicated to programme and project management. In the Spring it’s normally held at the NEC in Birmingham and in the Autumn it’s held in London at Olympia (the next one is on the 30th September for 2 days). The exhbition has organisations in attendance from most areas of programme and project management (PPM) such as software, tools, recruitment, training etc. In fact, for many years it felt like the Programme and Project Management Software Show which was a shame because it turned off people who weren’t necessarily interested in it. Now I think the balance is back, yes there are still quite a lot of software stands but there are also a whole host of other exhibitors – enough of the non-software kind to make it worth your while attending.
Project Challenge has also introduced free seminars throughout the day which I know were popular (some more so than others) but at least delegates can pick and choose quite easily (just show up and sit down!). I managed to catch snippets of various seminars but one of the most popular was Melanie Franklin from Maven Training, Melanie’s presentation covered interpersonal skills in project management and is available to view here. OK so Melanie is from a training organisation and this is about developing skills so of course there’s a little self promotion but don’t let that put you off (in fact you would probably want to speak to Maven after hearing the presentation!). At the end of the day the exhibition is all about organisations selling their wares and in some of these presentations there’s a lot of value added information which you would normally have to pay a lot of money to see/hear (I’m thinking about recent conferences where tickets are £200+ and Project Challenge is free!)
Presentations from every speaker are now available to download from the website and like I said some are better than others and some are more of a blatant sell than others – I’ll leave you to work out which are the most valuable to you
Me - Working (!)
In between working on my own stand, I managed to have a look around the show and talked to a few people. Surprisely there wasn’t a lot of buzz around some of the stands, in fact the general feeling of the day from other exhibitors was that there were a lot of visitors to the exhibition that were either looking for a job right now or getting cagey about losing their job. This meant that the buzz tended to be around the training companies (help! do I need training to help me find another job) and of course recruitment companies (help! find me a job)
I stayed away from the OGC stands (mainly because I’ve got my fill of OGC based products for a while from other places) and APM (there’s still no update on the chartered status of project management) but picked up “stuff” from PMI to keep up to date on PMI based developments and also pick up the magazine
Chatting at the Show!
(not read it before because I’m not a member, I think we’re due a blog article on the project management magazine offerings in this country, hmm more later). Also chatted a lot with the people from Eurocharts (they were next door to us and we struck up a relationship whilst commiserating about swollen feet ) good kit especially in the more manufacturing and engineering project management environment
We also did some quality sweet pinching from other exhibitors and dropped a few business cards in the box in hope of winning a few prizes (we never do but the cynical amongst us thought exhibitors probably pick out the name and job title that most looks like a decision maker, you’ll be glad to hear we don’t go so low and Roland, a PM from High Wycombe walked away with our Sony PSP prize!)
