Project Management Program Marks Decade of Thought Leaders’ Influence

The Project Management Program at UT Dallas launched its first Project Management Symposium in 2007. The one-day event drew 21 speakers and 75 attendees.

As the symposium this summer celebrates it 10-year-anniversary, the successful event — being held Aug. 11 and 12 — has become so popular that it has grown into a conference with six tracks over two days with around 50 speakers and 500 attendees.

The Naveen Jindal School of Management hosted the inaugural symposium in collaboration with the Dallas chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI), led by the then President Dwarakanathan Ivengar and PMI World Journal editor David Pells. The institute and the journal still co-sponsor the event.

The gathering has found similar loyalty among participants.

“The audience loves the event and keeps coming back,” said Debbie Samac, program manager of the Project Management Program. “A very large number of our people are repeat attendees. They love our keynotes, interesting and relevant track presentations. And I think we price it attractively. It’s a reasonable cost to get a great deal of information and interact and network with other project managers.”

The symposium draws managers who oversee projects in a variety of fields — engineering, construction, healthcare, transportation and overseas projects, among others. Speakers who are thought leaders in the industry are as diverse as retired NASA astronaut and UT Dallas three-degree alumnus Jim Reilly, BS ‘77, MS ‘87 and PhD ’95, to former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert. They speak on topics ranging from using emotional intelligence to develop award-winning public sector projects to avoiding and recovering from project disasters.

Jim Joiner, founding director of the Project Management Program, helped lead the push to begin offering graduate project management courses at UT Dallas and eventually to holding an annual symposium where project managers could share ideas and best practices. Before the program — and later the symposium — were launched, Joiner saw a growing job-market demand for project managers in his field. At the time, there was no global accreditation for higher education programs in project management, and there were less than 15 schools offering project management academic programs.

“A surfer will wait for the next wave. We got in front of the wave and rode it, and it’s been a lot of fun,” Joiner said.

“We wanted to try offering a symposium because we felt there was a need for it,” Joiner said. “Project management goes back to Noah and building the ark, but project management being a recognized profession is fairly new.”

Project managers apply processes, methods, knowledge and skills to achieve the objectives of a project. Managers can bring project-management expertise to any job to plan, create schedules, allocate resources and build teams.

“In 1997, when we started our program, project management was beginning to blossom and a lot of people were talking about it. We later started the symposium because we felt the interest was there.”

Joiner retired in 2010 but teaches operations management courses and goes on two international study trips with students. He also serves as the master of ceremonies at the annual symposiums.

Conference speakers, said Samac, submit abstracts, and a selection committee chooses only those that are considered relevant and interesting to the program’s target audience.

“We usually receive around 65 abstracts, and we have 45 to 48 slots. If we get 100 abstracts, and we feel that only 35 of them are of value, we’ll only select 35,” Samac said. “For us, it’s much more about the quality.”

This symposium this year will feature a theme: A Key to Business Success. The conference will welcome an array of speakers including Karen Nocket, vice president of Enterprise Services at Toyota Motors North America, who will speak on “Practical Basics for Standing Up a Project,” and Eric Bennett, executive director of the UT Dallas Brain Performance Institute, who will talk about “Your Brain Performance.”