Presenting at the 2nd Annual Project Management Symposium at UTD

I’ve been holding off on this announcement until I finished the paper (mainly to make sure I actually finished it!).

I’ll be speaking at University of Texas at Dallas’ 2nd Annual Project Management Symposium on August 18-19 in Richardson, TX.  I’ll be presenting in the Project Management Methods – A (Track 3) on August 18 at 4:40 to 5:40 PM.  There are some other very interesting topics being presented…hope mine doesn’t get lost in the shuffle! 🙂

The presentation and paper is on an interesting topic (more on that in a few minutes).  My co-author, Chad Jordan, and I were able to get some interesting ideas down on paper and get it accepted for presentation at the symposium.  At some point I hope to be able to share the paper on this blog (or at least link to it).

The paper is titled “Project Management and the Stockholm Syndrome“.

The abstract is:

Project success in the world of client/vendor relationships hinges on two things: The ability of a project team to plan, manage and deliver results; and the ability to build and maintain relationships.  Most project teams understand the pitfalls of delivery but many do not realize that another pitfall is associated with building relationships. For example, what happens when project managers or other team members begin to associate more closely with the client or vendor then with their own organization?   This pitfall, which has the same characteristics as the Stockholm Syndrome, can be a significant risk for any project.

This paper addresses the topic of behaviors similar to the Stockholm Syndrome as applied to project managers and project teams. This is not an in-depth research study into the psychological effects of managing stressful projects and how these stresses might cause a ˜Stockholm Syndrome” effect. The purpose of the paper is to provide an overview on the syndrome and its associated behaviors and give some insights gathered from a real-world project where symptoms similar to the Stockholm Syndrome appeared and how these symptoms were recognized and overcome.

The idea for this paper came about one day when chatting with a former colleague, Gene De Libero.  Gene postulated that the affects of stress on project managers might be similar as stresses found in a hostage/captor environment.  We discussed the topic some more and decided to work on a research project. That project never really got underway, but Chad and I were able to grind out a paper on the topic.

This particular topic lends itself to future research, which is a good thing considering I’m working on a Doctorate degree 🙂