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The PMI SF Student Club & The Lam Family College of Business are excited to host renowned project business expert, author and trainer Oliver F. Lehmann, visiting us from GERMANY.

Join us in this great in-person speaker event!

SPACE IS LIMITED - be sure to register!

AGENDA:

12:PM - 12:30 Check-in and refreshments

1-2pm speaker session

LOCATION:

San Francisco State University main campus, 1600 Holloway Ave. SF CA

- full details will be provided upon registration.

Topic

When the Project Is the Business

Most project management literature describes projects that support a business – internal initiatives, funded from a budget, measured by benefits realized somewhere down the line. But a large share of today’s projects involve two or more organizations as customers and contractors. These projects are business. Project Business.

For the contractor, the job is to perform for a paying project customer under contract, and cash flow and profit margin are as important as scope and backlog. Often, they are the key issues.

The business nature of these projects changes everything. The project is no longer a cost center but a profit center. The customer–contractor interface becomes a risk surface, where misunderstandings, disputes, and delays turn directly into financial loss. In this setting, project managers need to know their contract as well as their schedule, and they carry a business responsibility that the classic project management toolkit does not prepare them for. They learned to manage the cross-functional setting, but their projects are cross-corporate.

Drawing on more than three decades in cross-corporate project settings, this talk introduces Project Business Management as the discipline for projects done for money. It shows where common project management practices fail in contract-based projects, what project managers on both sides of the interface should do differently, and why the health of a contractor’s projects and the health of the contractor itself are, in the end, the same thing.

Learning Objectives

After this session, participants will be able to:

Distinguish projects that support a business from projects that are the business, and understand what that shift means for the project manager’s responsibility.

Recognize the customer–contractor interface as a risk surface and the failure patterns typical for contract-based projects.

Apply core Project Business Management practices – contract awareness, Continuous Business Development, and Benefit Engineering – to protect the project’s business result.

Speaker

Oliver F. Lehmann, MSc, ACE, PMP, PMI-RMP, PBP – Globally renowned PMI member and volunteer since 1998; founder of the Project Business Foundation; author of “Project Business Management” (Auerbach/Taylor & Francis).

About the Lam Family School of Business: The Lam Family College of Business (LFCoB) at San Francisco State University (SFSU) is a leading institution of business education in the San Francisco Bay Area, with an emphasis on preparing students to succeed in an economy that is global in nature. Our commitment to sustainable business, diversity, and global partnerships echoes our core philosophy of responsible leadership. As one of the top-ranked public universities, we are recognized worldwide for our investments in visionary academics, diversity, and social responsibility. The LFCoB equips students with a purposeful, action-oriented and quality business education of unmatched value in San Francisco.

About the PMI SF Student Club: Is an official branch of the Global PMI Student Club program, designed to provide a gateway into the professional PM community for emerging project professionals and adult project learners.