My first career was almost the foreign service. Reading articles like this, a fascinating 1994 interview with Ambassador Joseph Lake about opening the first US embassy in Mongolia almost makes me wish I’d followed through with that.
http://adst.org/2015/08/opening-an-embassy-in-the-land-of-genghis-khan/
It is all the more interesting because I showed up on the scene three years later and knew some of the folks he mentioned – and was in the same office space.
It’s been a bit of a tradition to blog up some of our more ambitious family vacations, and this blog commemorates our 2015 trip, just completed.
As a bit of background, as most of our regular readers may know, my in-laws live in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia – as do most of my wife’s family. We also happened to meet up and start dating when we both lived in Beijing 20 years ago. Hence, we tend to schlep the kids over to that part of the world every couple of years to connect them with their roots and expose them to our past.
This time, and I realize that this sounds a bit redundant, we figured if we were going to Mongolia anyways, we should make a real trip out of it. Hence, as I worked through the vagaries of international ticketing (there are no direct flights from the US to Mongolia), we ended up with an itinerary that circumnavigated the globe via Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and China. (Props by the way to anyone who knows which one of those countries doesn’t belong in the same category as the other three.)
Highlights below….
What’s there to say, but Istanbul is our new favorite city (I know, we say that about all cities.)
We did learn that when the kids are about to self-destruct from a toxic cocktail of jet lag and cultural overload, we could frog march them into the visitor section of the nearest mosque – where they’d have to remove their shoes and sit on the carpet quietly till they settled down. It’s a tactic we’ll have to reuse on trips going forward (although it doesn’t work so well in Tibetan monasteries due to the noise).
From Turkey, en route to Mongolia, we stopped for a couple of days in Kyrgyzstan.
My wife and I both got to exercise our Russian language skills (Hers is high school. Mine is a smattering of random Mongolian accented nouns.)
…and we were able to meet up with an old friend from university who’s now working in Bishkek.
It’s a great country full of great people. That being said, to be honest, if I had to pick one Central Asian country to visit, I’d still go to….
…where we landed right before the annual Naadam festivities kicked off. (Naadam, of course, being a celebration of Mongolian culture that happens every summer). We hit Sukhbaatar Square to see the rehearsal of the evening concert.
Then, thanks to an awesome sister in law, we scored tickets to the opening ceremony in the national stadium.
And I was introduced into the coolest traditional game I think I’ve ever seen, shagai harvaa. It’s played by launching dominos about 6-7 meters through the air to knock down the target (below) while everyone chants in a monotone.
After another couple of days in Mongolia (a minor bout of food poisoning from some fermented horse milk, a trip to what is basically a Buddhist amusement park, and a lot of vodka), it was time to dust off our rather rusty Mandarin and head to….
…for a couple of days of meeting up with friends and looking for that old Beijing culture. Note how clear the air was on this visit to Jingshan Park (really….last time we were there, you couldn’t see that far):
We hit our old digs in the Peking University campus….
…and closed it out with a visit to Beijing’s resident roller derby team, the Rickshaw Rollers….
All in all a nice trip – and a solid excuse not to have blogged much over the last couple of months. Now, however, that excuse is gone, and I’ll work to pick up the blogging pace.
Come on out to Microsoft’s offices to see what’s next in project and portfolio management. For more information and to register, please check out this link:
Looking for more portfolio management information? Check out our new corporate blog, recently (re)launched:
http://www.umt.com/blog/25-years-service-brand-new-website/
…and for the full list of UMT blogs:
Looking to learn more about how Microsoft’s Project Online will support your strategic project portfolio management capabilities? Come on out to Microsoft’s Tempe office next Thursday afternoon (10/16) where I’ll be leading a hands on session on the topic.
http://www.umt.com/events/experience-project-online-tempe/
*****
Please join us for a half-day session to explore how Microsoft Project Online can transform your approach to Project Portfolio Management.
This session is a chance to hear about Project Online, Microsoft’s best in class Project and Portfolio Management solution. Project Online is used by leading organizations around the world to align tactical execution with strategic goals.
Key themes that will be covered include:
• Data driven, strategic decision making leveraging best in class portfolio analytics.
• How to successfully leverage project management practices to drive portfolio value optimization.
• Visibility into your portfolio in the cloud from anywhere and ensuring that work is authorized and reflects the priorities of the business.
Sorry for not posting in a while. Having a bit of a role change, starting with a new client, travelling, vacations, conferences, blah, blah – which has sucked up all available bandwidth for a bit.
Interestingly enough, I note readership seems to go up the less I write. Not sure what I can conclude about that.
There’s still a hefty backlog of posts just waiting to be written however. In the meantime, thanks for reading and for all of the great comments and questions.
As you probably are all aware, the sessions from Project Conference 2014 have all been made available online. Here’s my list of the “must see” sessions. The only problem, of course, is that I didn’t get to see all of the sessions – in fact, I didn’t get to see very many sessions at all.
Hence my list is basically culled from the list of what other folks have told me that I should see. It’s a good start, I suppose – and not intended to disparage anyone’s presentations that didn’t make the list.
Gartner Shares the Most Important PPM Trends for 2014; Donna Fitzgerald and Ben Chamberlain. If you’re a PMO director or often called to play the role of one, make sure to see this presentation on how to do portfolio management – and make sure you have your Amazon account open on another screen and a credit card handy as you’ll be buying a number of books after this.
AWESOME User Experience for PWA From a Great Visual Design; Dariana Kestenholz and Mathias Laegdsmand – A simple way to drastically improve the look and feel of the main PWA site – and thus drive user adoption.
Real World Reports: Business Intelligence in Project Online and Project Server 2013; Mike McLean and I skim a rock over options for reporting against online and on-prem installations.
MS Project Server at Qualcomm; Nelson Diaz presents a case study on a Project Server implementation.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, there’s plenty more where that came from – including a vast array of customer case studies and technical chalk talks.
Well, after delivering three presentations on consecutive days at the last Project Conference in 2012, I swore to never again do so, and to keep my presentations at any conference down to a manageable number somewhere between zero and two. You can see how well that worked as I proudly announce I will be presenting (and/or co-presenting) the following sessions in Anaheim in February:
Enhancing Value Through Socializing Your PMO: Yammer for Project Management (with the Christophe Fiessinger – now accepting candidates for mildly off color French jokes if anyone has them)
Enterprise Reporting – Business Intelligence Overview in Project Online and Project Server 2013 (with longtime partner in crime, Mr. Mike McLean)
The Epistemological Adventure: Best Practices in Enterprise Tool Deployments
I figure two co-presentations count for 1 actual presentation as Mike and Christophe will be doing all of the heavy lifting. That still gets me in the ballpark of 2ish total presentations at one conference….sort of. Luckily, no Earned Value this time around. I may rue saying this, but I’ll take the Enterprise Social zealots over the EVM zealots any day of the week.
Other UMT folks will be around and presenting as well:
Integrated IT Portfolio Analysis – Going Beyond PPM and to Effectively Run the Business of IT (Ben Chamberlain and Gartner’s Donna Fitzgerald – of whom I am quite the fan)
PPM 2.0 – 4 Things You Did Not Know You Could Do With Project Server to Realize Even More ROI (Ben Chamberlain & Catalin Olteanu)
…as well as co-presenting a number of case studies with our clients. It should be fun….
Feel like this blog has gone off the rails and want to vent in person? Feel like things are just great and want to share your ideas? Come on out to San Diego in November for the PMO Symposium – where a couple hundred motivated PMO directors will get together to share ideas on how to better provide value to the organization.
I’ll be hanging out in or near the Microsoft booth and looking forward to chatting…although I’m admittedly a bit bummed that my favorite Guamanian restaurant (full disclosure: it’s actually the only one I’ve ever been to), the Islander Grill shut down a couple of years ago. Luckily, an Internet search reveals Chamorros seems to be carrying the flag.
It’s no secret that I’ve retreated to my underground lair of late to work on upping my presentation game by trying my hand at the odd bit of stand up comedy (and roller derby, but that’s a different story). That, of course, begs the question, how does one get started in the world of standup? I could take a class on standup, but as a couple searches quickly determined, Houston appears to be a bit of a wasteland in that regard – although, as in all cultural comparisons, Austin definitely shows promise. Hence, I’ve retreated to Plan B, and started my odyssey to become an amateur standup comedian (after all, let’s be realistic, going pro is a non-starter) by going out and purchasing a couple books on comic theory.
Thusly, I found myself reading the Comic Toolbox the other day, as the author, John Vorhaus, deconstructed different comedy types. One of them particularly resonated. You see, the ensemble comedy (think Friends, Bad News Bears, Inglorious Basterds, etc.) involves what is considered a group protagonist. The group itself is the protagonist as it strives to reach its goals, whether they be killing Nazis, banding together to win the championship, or raising enough money to buy their old theater from the evil businessman.
The comedy lies in the conflicts between the members of the team whom invariably are written with divergent characteristics and personalities. The common goal binds them however, because without that common goal, their radically divergent personalities would quickly cause them to lose cohesion and focus on their own specific needs, not that of the team. The common goal provides the catalyst for the team to work through their differences and unite in the face of overwhelming odds.
Without that driving goal for the group protagonist to work against, the team would quickly split apart and disperse into the four winds. That would no longer be a comedy. That would be a tragedy.
Project Epistemology 