Team Building and Project Management

Jim Morgan, "What Science Says about Team Building: It's What Techies Want to Hear",

-AND-

Glenn Willis, "Project Management: It's About the People, Not Gantt Charts"

Scheduled Speakers:

Jim Morgan, M.A., PMP®, Team Coach, TeamTrainers Consulting

What Science Says about Team Building: It's What Techies Want to Hear

People who work with facts and numbers often are skeptical when asked to do "team building" activities. It turns out they have good reasons. Facts and numbers from scientific research show that a number of claims by business speakers and consultants regarding teamwork are either untrue or unimportant. This dialog by a team developer who has worked primarily in technical organizations is based on a review of more than 550 sources, mostly peer-reviewed journal articles or books by and for scientists. It busts the myths of team building and reveals what you can do as a team member or leader to really make group work easier. This highly interactive "no slides" presentation by a speaker known for his energy and humor comes with a handout listing the facts about each myth and citing its sources.

Jim Morgan, M.A., is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP®) who first trained self-directed work teams in 1994 at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has held management positions in six industries and taught team leadership or assisted teams for organizations such as Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and the City of Seattle. Jim founded TeamTrainers™ Consulting in 2000 to coach business teams toward high performance and solve teamwork problems. He added exhaustive research of the scientific literature about teams to his real-world team development experiences to create his method, called The SuddenTeams™ Program. A "do-it-yourself" book version was published in 2009. Jim holds a master's degree from the University of Missouri and a graduate certificate in project management from the University of Washington. He has formal training in adult instruction and job task analysis and has taught everything from meeting facilitation skills to the martial arts over 25 years.

Glenn Willis, PMP®, Project Manager, Laboratory Information Systems, Duke University Health Systems Clinical Laboratories

Project Management: It's About the People, Not Gantt Charts

Mr. Willis has over 20 years of Information Technology experience and has worked at organizations such as IBM, Arizona Republic, Los Angeles Times and currently as a project manager with Duke University Health System. Mr. Willis received his Bachelor's in Computer Science and Applied Math (double major) from S.U.N.Y. at Stony Brook and Master's in Finance from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.