Action packed!

BANGALORE: The first day of PML conference kick started with a welcome address by Navyug Mohnot, Executive Director, QAI India followed by an inaugural address by Prof U.R.Rao, Chairman, PRL Council, ISRO-DOS to an enthusiastic crowd of over 250 participants, from various IT companies.

K. Subramanian, Covansys in his speech stressed the importance of timely delivery as a key to success of software projects, which could be achieved by training project managers on competent project management skills. Ravi Ramu's talk on 'Project Management -- The Big Picture!' was found of great interest by the participants, where he advised them to look at a '$1 billion project as a $1 billion business', and prodded them to manage projects like a business.

Post lunch, John Hopkinson of International Systems Security Engineering in his session on 'Security Engineering - The New Wave Opportunity for India', said that after quality security is the next big thing India has to seriously think about. He added that many companies are looking at software security as a very important need, worldwide and software majors like Microsoft are spending hugely on it. He said, ' security has to come in the mainstream, and has to get incorporated in application software, we cannot live in isolation.'

This session was followed by a session 'Six Sigma Project Management' by Dr Richard Zultner, of Zultner & Co. He said that Six Sigma is the new paradigm in software development and by following it project managers can deliver more in less time without sacrificing on quality, and reduce project schedule by 15-25%. Following this were interesting sessions by David Parker of Merant, on 'Best Practices for Change Management' and by Dr P S Goel of ISRO Satellite Centre on 'Complexities of Managing Space Systems.'

In between these sessions there were paper presentations by various companies like TCS, Cognizant and mPACT technologies. Companies into project management, consultancy, training and tools had their stalls put up at the venue to educate the participants about their products and services.

The mood at the conference was positive and participants found these sessions very informative and useful. According to some of them these types of conferences break the monotony of routine jobs and help them think out of the box for newer ideas that can be implemented for fruitful results at the work place.