MSCPMP Circle Quarterly Forum #3 (2010)
Posted by Johnson Yike on August 4, 2010
MC at work
Yesterday (3 August 2010) I’ve attended the MSCPMP Circle Quarterly Forum #3 and it was held at the beautiful Bukit Jalil Golf and Country Resort (map). The sun was shining brightly and the greens were singing their tempting tune to the golfers to play a few rounds. However, golfing was not the purpose for the large turn out of people there. The turnout for that morning was the largest for MSCPMP Circle with a total of 254 participants. It was truly fun to be able to meet my fellow project managers again – getting updates on which organization they are with now since the last quarterly forum, and to meet people who are new to the MSCPMP forums. I was the volunteer Master of Ceremony (MC) for the morning.
In the usual fashion, the founder of the MSCPMP Circle, SK Khor PMP CSM gave the welcoming address, acknowledging the first time participants to the forum, and the latest person (453rd) to obtained PMP certification that was trained by AsiaICTPM. He went in great detail to recap the Circle’s direction on how the last few forum topics has been to ‘Power Up Your Careers‘ and to bring project managers to the next level of success.
The topic of the morning was ‘Accounting and Finance for Project Manager‘. This was a real treat because most IT Project Managers I know usually are not involved in establishing or creating the budget for a project. I’d remember in one of my previous employment the company Financial Controller loudly stated, ‘Why do project managers need to know the budget? just manage the project !‘, however when we are carrying out our projects we are usually expected to complete the project with Scope, Time and Cost.
Speaker: LEE Hooi Seng
The esteemed speaker of the day was a Chartered Accountant, Mr. LEE Hooi Seng, AMN, CA(M), FTII, FCA, CFP, RFP, MA. Extracted from AsiaICTpm website;
Lee Hooi Seng and his team from LLTC Chartered Accountants (www.lltc.com.my) will help you to understand the Accounting and Financial aspects of Project Management, including how to apply proper accounting principles to a project. He will cover Project Financing, Taxation, Cost Accounting and Budgeting as well.
Mr Lee was an eloquent, entertaining and established speaker. He established the basic understanding and fundamentals of accounting and finance first; by explaining the basis accounting and financial terms, and by showing to us two financial statements and reports of two public listed companies. During his presentation, he had constantly injected funny jokes and witty one liners that tickled our funny bone, and more importantly kept us focus on his talk. Sharing from his vast personal experience and knowledge, he was able to draw the relevancy of the topic to projects. He also shared some tips on how a company can go about obtaining project financing from different avenues, and how to keep the money legally.
Quotes:
“The basis principle of finance is to how maximise inflow of cash into the company, while minimising the outflow of cash out of the company.”
“When you have a vast amount of relevant information, you can decide on the appropriate actions“
The session ended approximately 11:50AM, allowing 20 minutes for Questions & Answers. The group then proceeded to capture a group photo and to a scrumptious buffet lunch.
MSCPMP Quarterly Forum #3 participants - photo courtesy of Angelia Ooi, PMP
As I was calling it a day I was thinking, there are not many project managers with the entrepreneur’s spirit, and being a project manager may not be something they had aspired to be but rather have been told to be – SK coined the term, ‘accidental project manager‘. I was thankful to the organizers of the MSCPMP Circle for bringing to the project managers relevant topics with the purpose of upgrading our career. I had posed a simple yet somewhat challenging question to the organizers, ‘What’s Next?‘. The organizer has the challenge to keep bringing exciting new topics while finding a way to provide the previous useful forum information to the new comers.
I am looking forward to the next MSCPMP Quarterly Forum #4 on 14th October 2010.
Organizers / Supporters:
- Advanced Technology Studies Centre (atSC): www.atsc.org.my
- Asia ICT Project Management: www.asiaictpm.com
- Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC): www.mdec.my
