Published
This year’s Major Project Association annual conference, Major Projects 2061: Lessons, Ambitions and Practice for the next 40 years, includes a short session during which we are inviting Association members to share examples of what might be described as ‘tomorrow’s world, today‘: project techniques, technology applications, ways of working, which anticipate the way we will need to do things in the future but which are already being applied on projects today.
We’ve invited our members to share anything that fits that description via a Pecha Kucha presentation of up to five minutes involving a mandatory 20 slides. We’ll share two of these presentations during a dedicated slot on the afternoon of the conference and the others will be played during the coffee and lunch breaks and then after the event via the Association website and our YouTube channel.
If this idea catches on and we can encourage a number of members to share some of the groundbreaking things they are doing, we may add it as a slot to future conferences too.
Sharing great stories of good practice and the lessons we can learn from them is what the Association is all about. Using the Pecha Kucha format is one way of giving the shares a consistent feel, which is helpful for those watching. The brevity of the medium and the speed at which the slides need to follow one another means that the presenters will need to use impactful and uncluttered images, avoid unnecessary text and, above all, resist the temptation to use jargon or acronyms. These may seem like a shorthand way of conveying your message but using them risks turning off those watching and befuddling them with TLAs (sorry, three letter acronyms).
Major Projects depend on their stakeholders and, ultimately, all of the citizens who are going to use the infrastructure, access the system, or are underwriting the development with their taxes, which means that finding simple, brief and impactful ways of sharing what you are doing is increasingly an absolute requirement for every project organization.
Any Major Projects Association members who would like to submit a Pecha Kucha video, recording an example of how you are delivering “tomorrow’s world, today”, should contact our Knowledge Manager, Jonathan Norman for more information.