PMI Pittsburgh Chapter

Professional Outreach

Professional Organization Outreach forges alliances with other professional groups located in the Pittsburgh area. Through these partnerships, we can work to customize external resources to meet the specific needs of project managers. At the same time, we work with these organizations to provide knowledge around our area of expertise, further promoting awareness of the benefits of project management and PMI. Volunteers from PMI Pittsburgh serve as Relationship Managers to the professional organizations.

If you would like to volunteer as a relationship manager to help us work with our fellow professional organizations in the Pittsburgh area to increase opportunities to our members, please contact Anne Monroe, Director of Professional Outreach at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

PMI members serving as relationship managers to professional organizations:

Vinny Gala: Relationship Manager to Engineers Without Borders (EWB) - University of Pittsburgh & Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW)

Kimberly Love: Relationship Manager to Leadership Pittsburgh Inc.

Sandra Williams: Relationship Manager to Toastmasters

Anne-Isabelle Zacharias - Relationship Manager to American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)

Upcoming Events

Innovation in Healthcare Technology Conference
Realizing the Future of Health Care

When: April 5, 2013 from 9:00AM - 6:00PM
Where: Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA
Cost: $35
Registration: To Register for this event click HERE.

Increasing health care costs and demand for health care services resulting from an aging and ailing population has made health care unaffordable and has undermined US businesses’ competitiveness in the global economy. Recently enacted health reforms aim to increase access to health care, decrease costs, and improve the quality of care. Innovation in health care technology—ranging from the implementation and use of HIT to the development of new medical devices—will change business models, improve efficiencies, and prove critical to the advancement of low cost, high quality health care. This conference hosted by CMU will explore the role of innovation in health care technology in achieving an improved health care system. Panel session topics include Healthcare Policy, Biopharma - Challenges and Opportunities for a Healthy Future, Entrepreneurship and Healthcare IT.

The conference will be held on Friday, April 5th. For more information and to register please go to link http://ihtconference.com/.

ASQ Pittburgh’s Spring Quality Conference: Quality Improvement Strategies
When: April 12, 2013, 8:00AM - 5:00PM
Where: Regional Learning Alliance in Cranberry Woods, 850 Cranberry Woods Drive, http://www.therla.org/visit/
PDU(s): 1.0 RUs (8 hours) will be awarded to attendees of the one day conference.
Host: Hank Sobah

There will be two consecutive tracks covering, Quality Tools and Quality People and Leadership.

Cost: $99 ($75 for full time students with student ID)

Call ESWP to Register 412-261-4300, early prepayment signup discount $79 by March 22, 2013.

Quality Leadership is essential in the development of successful Quality Initiatives in all businesses. Quality Leadership from the ground up must be an active process that takes place throughout an organization (top to bottom). Business in virtually every industry demands predictable, reliable, cost effective results, which demands high performance processes, products, and/or services.
No matter what industry, the topic of Quality should to be on the forefront of all business processes that you implement. Manufacturing, Finance, Nuclear, Health Care, Services, and Retail are just examples of the many industries where Quality performance and Continual Improvement is critical to predictable viability and success.

The right use of Quality Tools is critical to the successful implementation which yields predictable business results in all industries. Those businesses and organization that are most successful are driven to success by People and Leadership that are clearly focused on Quality Improvement. Successful Quality Leadership is all about high performance teams leading efforts at continuous improvement and problem avoidance. Team members need to work together to ensure that their areas turn out dependable, high quality work. All of those areas come together to provide customers with products or services that safely and cost effectively serve to help ensure the customers’ business success.
When Quality succeeds, it’s due to a relentless focus on evaluating and understanding:

Do the organization's values, policies and leadership actions represent a Quality oriented culture?
Are the right tools and measures in place to deliver on the organization's definition of quality? Do the plans of the business focus on the right goals, clear accountability and expectations for quality improvement? What are the major initiatives to improve quality measures with on-time results?
Is quality central to the organization's competitive differentiation strategy? How can an organization make it a core focus?

Strong Quality Leadership throughout the organization is important because it ensures safe, reliable, cost effective products and services, and helps ensure the viability of a business. High quality means success. Happy customers will be returning customers, and this is what every organization strives for. As Philip Crosby said, “Quality is Free” - it more than pays for itself.

Time	Quality Tools	People and Leadership
8:00 – 9:00	KEYNOTE SPEAKER Joel Ettinger President/CEO Category One Inc. The achievement of sustained differentiating national-scale role model performance made possible by the leadership's adoption of the framework of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program
9:00 – 10:00	Teresa Whitacre - Use of Quality Tools in your Career		Tricia Pil, Christine Deschamps UPMC - Quality Improvement in Health Care: Comparative Assessment of Screening Tools to Assess for Aspiration Risk in Hospitalized Inpatients
10:00 – 11:00	Nick Skovran - Creating Collaboration		Brien Palmer – Implement Change More Effectively through Psychotherapy Model
11:00 – 12:00	Sharon Gregory - “Innovation & Design for Six Sigma Introduction		Jim Edmiston – Root Cause Analysis
12:00 – 1:00	LUNCH
Time	Quality Tools		People and Leadership
1:00 – 2:00	Paul Armstrong - Innovative way to present Deming's principles		Jonathan Stiffy – Washington Penn Plastics - The Importance of Inter-technician Testing Studies
2:00 – 3:00	Dave Sartori - PPG Industries, Inc. - Share observations and lessons learned from over a decade of Six Sigma Implementation experience at PPG		Bill Thomas, Centric Performance, LLC – Customers and Leadership: The Keys to Optimizing Continuous Improvement
3:00 – 4:00	Larry Kopyta - How We Learned to Love the Cloud		Diane Bickford - How to Use Behavior-Based Interviewing to Select High-Performing Quality Professionals
4:00 – 5:00	Shankar Lakhavani - Application strategies for Lean and Six Sigma projects		Paul Armstrong – Enthusapprove - Applying Deming to Change Management: ( has a longer abstract if we want it): Worried about managing change? Follow Deming’s advice in a 2010’s way. Drive out fear, create joy in work and continually improve are mutual necessities, not niceties. Learn how to apply this philosophy to managing change in our era of social networking technology, global innovation teams and knowledge sharing communities. This session will ignite your enthusiasm and provide a strategy for managing change through building connections, tapping creativity and accelerating contribution
5:00 – End	Hank Sobah, Robin Dudash - Conference Summary, Wrap Up

Past Events

Presentation by INCOSE to PMI Pittsburgh Engineering LIG Meeting

Professional Organization Outreach established a relationship with The Three Rivers Chapter of INCOSE (International Council on Systems Engineering). Joe Elm of the Three Rivers Chapter presented "Leveraging Systems Engineering to Improve Program Performance" at the February, 2012 PMI Engineering LIG meeting.

Project Management Presentation for University of Pittsburgh Engineers Without Borders student organization

Pittsburgh PMI Professional Outreach team was invited to give a presentation on Project Management to the University of Pittsburgh Engineers Without Borders student organization. Vinny Gala, PMP presented an "Introduction to Project Management" on Feb. 16^th, 2012, supported by Michael Sodini, PE, PMP. Approximately 20 students were in attendance and had an opportunity to ask questions about Project Management. In the words of one volunteer, “it was enjoyable to talk with the engineering students; kind of takes me back in time more than 30 years to all the same things they must be wondering about and concerned with as I was”!

ESWP Technical Society Fair

Pittsburgh PMI Outreach participated in the Engineers' Society of Western PA Technical Society Fair on November 9th. The Pittsburgh PMI Chapter had a booth with information about the Chapter and upcoming events. Pittsburgh PMI members Susan Keaney, Fred Koos, Pitchiah Balasubramanian and Anne Monroe manned the booth and interfaced with the other technical societies. Several technical societies expressed interest in building a collaborative relationship with the Pittsburgh PMI Chapter. The Outreach committee will post requests for volunteers to manage these relationships on the Chapter website.

TRAINING / EVENTS offered by professional organizations

Links to Professional Organizations

Three Rivers Chapter of International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE): www.incose.org/threerivers

Women in Bio (WIB): www.womeninbio.org