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E02 - Rebecca Fox, Dir Membership Association for Project Management

September 30, 2021

Host Michael O'Connor speaks with Mike DePrisco, COO with the Project Management Institute.  Hear Mike share insights into PMI strategy with PMBOK 7 and the PMP exam.  Learn about various certifications and memberships that PMI offers globally and hear what is on the horizon for PMI.

Discuss the Show and share your thoughts in the Forum!  We have a dedicated channel for the Certifications Around the World Webinar Series and we'd love to hear from you. 

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Host, Dr. Michael O’Connor, P.E., PMP, PGMP 

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Dr. Michael O'Connor is the Director Strategy and Project Management with Medtronic Corporate Science and Technology in Minneapolis, Minnesota (18+ years of Medtronic experience). He has over 35+ years of professional work experience and 30+ years of professional experience (mainly in project, program, and portfolio management) in the Medical Device Industry.

He was selected as an American Society for Quality Fellow (ASQ), selected as a Medtronic Technical Fellow, selected as an American Academy of Project Management Fellow (AAPM), selected as an Association for Project Management Fellow (APM) and selected as a Biomedical Engineering Society Fellow (BMES). He is a (PDMA) NPDP, (PMI) PMP®, PgMP®, (IPMA) IPMA-B certified, (IPM) CPD, (AAPM) MPM, CIPM and CPRM.

He is currently on the Board of Directors as a Director at large for the Minnesota PMI chapter and he is the Medtronic liaison for the Minnesota PMI chapter. He is also the representative for Medtronic on the PMI Global Executive Council. He is a Director at large with the Product Development and Management Association in 2020-2023 and is a former Director at Large for the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA). He is a Community Faculty Member at Metropolitan State University and an Adjunct Faculty instructor at the College of St. Scholastica and the University of Wisconsin, Platteville that is teaching Graduate level Project Management, Portfolio Management, Project Capstone, Procurement, and Culture / Organizational course(s).

Certifications Rebecca Fox - powered by Happy Scribe

Hello, everyone. And welcome to our certifications and memberships around the world. I'm excited today to have Rebecca Fox of APM, the Association for Project Management in Europe with us today, and she's going to go through some questions and the membership and things that APM that make them unique and make them special. So welcome, Rebecca.

Thanks, Michael. I hope I can do all those things you just said.

I'm sure you can. And maybe we can start with a little bit about yourself background, history to kick us off.

Sure. Yes. So yeah. I'm Rebecca Box, originally from the North East of England. I joined APM 2017. I've got an MBA from Manchester Business School. And I guess prior to joining APM, I worked for ten years for DHL Express internationally, actually not just here in the UK, but it is stint in to buy some time in Brussels. And I also worked for CIPS, which is a similar organization but a professional body for procurement and supply chain. So that's a bit about me.

Great. Thank you. So getting read to it, maybe you could tell us a little bit of history with the APM, what they're about, how large they are, anything else that you think would be important to kick this off?

Sure. So APM, we're actually turning 50 next year. So we were founded in 1972. I saw seven pioneers. I'd like to say it was sort of men and women, but it was, I think all guys at that time. And I suppose APN came from really that engineering, construction, it sort of technology background. But hopefully in the last 50 years, we've really evolved. We've now got over 35,000 individual members, and they're not just all in the UK. We've also got about just over two and a half thousand of those are outside the UK.

We've got 500 corporate members as well, which is a real, I think, great source of our strength. So we're working with some of the leading organizations again, UK and internationally. And we also have quite a number of chapters and a number of special interest groups as well, based on a lot of different topics and areas of the profession, including PMO as well.

Great. So maybe tell us how membership works. What are the different levels of membership? How do you get involved? Are there things free that people might be interested in that they want to check it out and kind of kick the tires. What what does membership look like for APM?

Yeah. Okay. So great questions. We've got four grades of membership. So we start off with a student membership so that's anyone in fulltime or parttime education doesn't have to be in project management. And it's also open to our apprentices. And that's free. So that's completely free. And we've got ten0 student members. And obviously we hope that we're bringing in the sort of next generation of professional project managers. Interestingly, in that number of student members, it's often people changing career as well. They're not always just youngsters as you might expect.

Then we have our associate member grade that's open to anyone with an interest in project management. There's no sort of barriers to entry or any criteria that's £138 annual sort of subscription. The next grade is our full membership that then gives you the professional designation map that you can use after your name. And that really signifies that you've got five years professionals of relevant experience. And there are some criteria for that one. And then our fellowship is our highest grade of membership, which is, I think, £195.

And that's really to recognize those people sort of giving back to the profession, either contributing to others, contributing to the body of knowledge and professional practice. And I suppose in terms of just the breakdown of our members across that 35,000, our fellows are now just over 700. So it's about 2% of the membership or full members, about 15,000. That's actually the bulk of the biggest contingent. And then our associate members about 7000. And as I mentioned, sort of student members, we have around 10,000 11,000. It sort of fluctuates, but essentially the benefits of membership is access to our branch and specific interest group network.

It's access to sort of peers. It's that professional recognition. It's being on that lifelong journey of education and learning access. Really. I always boil it down to two things. It's that sort of access to knowledge in a network, but also that professional recognition.

No, that's great. And just to clarify in the student membership is that for any student in the world at any type of University or College, or what is the guard rails with that just to be clear, because there may be a lot of students here. I think that's a fantastic benefit to have a free membership as a student and get all those great benefits that you have at a PM. So are there any guardrails or is just a student that's in a full time or part time or what?

Yeah, that's it. So you would just need to it's just an online registration that you would do. You would say where you're studying the course information. So it's not free. And definitely you also need to then say, my course ends in, I don't know, four years time or three years time. We certainly want to give people that are studying in full part time education that access, because often you don't know if you want to have what you want to do in your career, you don't necessarily know at that stage that you definitely want to work in project management, but you might be interested to find out more.

You might have some other professional memberships. And I suppose from the APM perspective, what we gain from it is awareness raising. So all of those students out there will go on to wherever they go on in their careers. They'll have somewhere in the back of their mind, they might think, oh, yeah. I remember APM. They gave me that free student membership, and they might be more likely to support us in the future wherever they end up. So, yeah, there's no guardrails in terms of geography, any students in the world.

And Interestingly, I know we do already have quite a number of international students. We have an international LinkedIn group as well that you don't even have to be a member to be on that. And there's some quite interesting discussions there as well.

Well, this is great because I didn't know this, and I teach at three universities currently. So I'm going to make sure I post that on all of my students pages because I'm teaching graduate level project management. That's wonderful. Thank you. So maybe switching gears a little bit. You talked about chapters. What are the chapters look like or where are they at? I know you're mainly based in Europe. I'm in the United States. You're a global company. So maybe you can say a little a little bit more about that and what that looks like.

And if people are listening to this that are in different places around the world, they get an idea of where they could connect in or if there are connections.

Yeah. So I think at the moment, the majority of our chapters are based in the UK. We have one chapter in Hong Kong, so they're officially recognized chapters, I should say, but we do support sort of communities of members or community networks, as we would call them in different locations. So, for example, we've got interest in the Republic of Ireland, in Jersey and Guernsey, places like Singapore, Dubai. Obviously, I mentioned Hong Kong, but also Malaysia. So often it might be linked to certain sectors. So, for example, I think we're quite prevalent in the energy sector, particularly oil and gas.

So some of those locations link with that. But we're always open to hook members in together. We have a virtual networking platform as well. So it's not all now about just face to face. And actually, if we get enough critical mass of people in any one location, we are open to starting a new chapter or branch, as we call them, which often confusing because people think, oh, a branch. That means traditionally, it sort of means like, I don't know, a bank or something, a branch of a bank.

But, yeah, it just means a group of volunteers that get together, organize events for that local community. And obviously, I suppose, have some of the local issues and local context. So, for example, in the southwest of the UK, it's a big area for aerospace and defense. So there might be more people of that sort of ilk. And then you go up to Scotland, you've got some of the sort of nuclear things happening and submarines and so on. So yeah, it's quite a diverse mix, but we certainly want to grow.

And we've definitely got international aspirations. But I guess it's fair to say we're nowhere near the size or footprint of PMI.

And maybe building a little bit on that. So what is your current and future strategy for APM? How are you looking to grow? And you mentioned PMI? Yeah, they're very large, but they don't cover everything and they're in the transformation of change. So how does APM play? And what does the strategy look like now and maybe into the future at a high level? I know there's probably a lot of detail behind that, but if you can.

I know that's fine. We're looking at sort of four key strategic leavers. The first one is around being the voice of the profession. The first one is around being the voice of the profession and sort of leading the profession. So, in other words, having an opinion leading by research, racing the profile representing the profession. The second is around sort of building that framework of all the breadth of the profession, because it's not just I think it's traditionally we've looked at sort of programs, portfolios and projects, those at 03:00 P.m..

But there's also there's PMO. There's contracts and procurement in this major projects. So I think there's lots of different areas and there's agile, for example, is huge. So actually, we want to be inclusive. We want to grow the diversity, but we recognize that we will need to develop content across the breadth of the profession and also have a framework of our qualifications and standards that are going to link some of the core with some of the specialist areas and have those roots to membership. So really, we've got to put some of the building blocks in building our sort of products, but in the right way, that's going to benefit everyone at all stages of their career.

And then, Thirdly, it's about just being excellent within ourselves. So enhancing, making sure got state of the art of digital capabilities and that kind of thing. And then I think the last one is just looking at some of our international sort of plans. And I think we're just really, to be honest, shaping those up as we speak at the moment. But we definitely want to grow our profile in our presence.

No, that's great. Maybe switching to the the part that I think I know, but I'm still learning is certification qualifications. How does that work at a PM? I think someone like myself and I'll just admit it I'm in the PMI thought process of certification, and I kind of get focused on that. You have a different way of looking at some of that, then the qualification piece. And maybe it's just terminology. But if you could go through some of that, that would be great.

Yeah, sure. So at the moment, we've got three core qualifications. I would say so we've got our project management sort of fundamentals. So that's really the entry level. So that's a 1 hour multiple choice exam. And obviously, then you can say that you've got the sort of fundamentals and that's really aimed at probably project teams. Somebody really starting out. It's going to give you the terminology, some of that, that sort of language and understanding. And that's typically a sort of two day talk course, then moving up the ladder of our qualifications.

We then have our APM project management qualification, to be honest, that's sort of the jewel in our Crown at the moment. That's the one that most people know about and take. And it's included in level four and level six apprenticeships in the UK. And this one is a three hour written exam. Currently, it's not multiple choice. It's like short written answers. And that one is really about demonstrating a certain level of knowledge and understanding. And it's equivalent to sort of year one of a University program, and then our third level in this sort of qualifications triangle, if you like, is our professional qualification.

So this one is we've just recently sort of revamped this, but this is to really provide something in that space between between that sort of that don't want to call it math market qualification, but that sort of middle level. But then something that really can take someone to those senior management roles and those director level roles and give them the benefit of some of the experience. So that one is based on a case study on an interview. And so it's really looking more at your knowledge as well as your skills and your competence.

And then obviously, above that is our charted project professional standard, as we call it. But yeah, essentially, that's really the sort of pinnacle. And we've now currently got just over two0 child project professionals all across the world, actually not just in the UK.

No, that's great. Thank you. We do have a question here. I'm going to give you here with multiple different choices available for PMS around the world. Why would someone want to join a PM over the others?

Yeah. Well, I suppose you're absolutely right. There are lots of choices. And I think we wouldn't necessarily if a different one is right for you, then that that's what you should join. If there's more people in that neck of the Woods and that's that community. But certainly from our perspective, we think we offer a fantastic network of professionals like minded professionals. We think we've got a great virtual platform where you can literally go and ask somebody a question and you get ten responses. We've got our specific interest groups that look at things like assurance, governance, benefits, realization.

So all into those specialist topic areas. And again, anyone around the world can be in that. So I think we've got a fantastic community. I'll be it sort of virtual as well as in person. And I think obviously we're really pleased with all the knowledge and resources that we're developing. We have a whole range of Elearning products that are available for our members. So really, hopefully giving everything to our members to support them at all stages of their career and the CPD?

No, that's great. Thank you. And you talked about the charter. Can you go into a little more detail about that and how one would become charted? I've looked at that. I think it's a great program. It's very rigorous. It's not for the faint hearted. I mean, there's a lot that goes into it. If you could explain that a little bit further, that would be great.

Yeah, definitely. So the chart status is really assessing four different things. So one is your technical knowledge. So in other words, how much you know about project management as a discipline, then it's assessing your professional practice. So in other words, your experience and and suppose looking obviously experience at a certain level of competence, then it's your CPD log. So in other words, you've kept your CPD log up to date, and then it's around your ethics. And I suppose signing up to the code of conduct. So those four things, then we've got we've got essentially three different roots.

So again, we're trying to make this as accessible as possible. So if you if you don't have any, let's say anything that you could use, that would give you the technical knowledge. So, for example, that might be a University degree in project management that would give you the technical knowledge that could be recognized as a route. But if you don't have any of those, it's a written submission. You would select up to four projects, programs or portfolios that you've worked on in the last five years.

That would be the basis then of your evidence. Then, in terms of your evidence, looking at 250 words for twelve competencies. So the competencies, there's two mandatory ones. And then there's some elective ones that you can choose. Actually, I've got sorry I got that the wrong way around ten mandatory ones, two elective ones, some includes some financial ones. But there's a wide range of those elective modules. Then if you're lucky enough to have both, I suppose you're a prior recognition of both your technical knowledge and professional practice, then that would give you the sort of route two application route.

So there's route one. If you've just got the technical knowledge, there's root two, if you happen to have the professional practice and the technical knowledge, and then there's root three, which is the completely experiential route. If you don't have either of those two. But through your work, you've gained that experience and that knowledge and that you would have a longer interview, for example, with the assessors, and we're doing the assessments virtually. So again, and just to put it in context, that's about 20% currently of our childhood project professionals are based outside the UK, so it's definitely gaining in popularity and traction.

And hopefully employers see that the value that those childhood project professionals bring in terms of the standards that they bring to their projects and the professionalism. And ultimately, our aim is to is where more projects succeed and are delivered better and get those outcomes and benefits that projects are there to deliver?

No, that's great. And do you think I've looked at it personally a little bit? Do you think they're going to be expanding or opening up like the route one with the degrees that are looked at? You think that's going to change here over time, or is it going to be pretty limited?

Oh, definitely. That's a really good question. So I think at the moment, there's only five. So you're making a really good point. Yeah. Absolutely. Part of our strategy going forward is to really proactively contact those universities and his that have project management degrees, either undergraduate or post graduate. And first of all, I suppose raise their awareness of what is childhood status. But also then do the mapping help them with the mapping that we can get those degrees recognized. And that really opens up the pool, then to more potential students, more members, more people coming through that pipeline.

And it's the real benefit, I think, for those courses to attract students as well, that oh, and by the way, you know, you can also apply for this once you've got the relevant experience. And of course, I'm sure it's similar in the US. But here we've also got quite a lot of mature students that are actually in full time employment. But I've gone back to University, perhaps to do a part time course in project management. So those people on those courses are already quite ahead of the game that they can.

Yeah. They're already probably eligible to apply to the childhood status. No.

Great for everyone listening to this. I think it's a great program. There's a lot of effort that's been put into that. And there's a lot of resources online. So I welcome people that are interested in that. And I do know, just because we're in the States here right now talking there are some people from the States that have been Chartered, right. And it's not just Europe. I think there's a handful of those folks that are Chartered. It's getting global.

Yeah. Is it quite a recognized in the state, then I can ask that question back to you, Michael.

You know, not so much. I mean, in the States, unfortunately, you know, PMI has most that market and where I work, I'm trying to bring in places like APM because we're a global company. They should be more access and more more things to choose from. Right. Pmi has its place, but they're changing their evolving and they don't have everything, even though they have a lot of people that have that. But yeah, I think the charter is unique to anything I've seen, and it's pretty rigorous. And I think it really shows that level of education experience all wrapped up into one.

I mean, it's pretty comprehensive. I've looked at it quite a bit. And one of these days I'm going to take the leap and do it. It's just a time commitment, but there's a lot there and a lot of it I have I just can cut and paste and bring it over. But I'm still trying to understand everything at A-P-M. So this is helpful for me. So I appreciate it. So switching gears, you talked a little bit about education. Whatnot? So I was on your website and I was looking at Am learning, can you that that looks really neat and unique and a lot of rich information there.

Yeah. Absolutely. So that is APM Learning is a sort of dedicated online resource area of elearning courses, useful resources. So things like templates, for example, you can find all different templates from a project initiation document to a project plan. So actually, oddly enough, the reason why we did that, we've often based on what are the things that people have come on to our website or Google and searched for the most. And one of them is like project plan template. So we've tried to actually, when we've designed this APM Learning, we've designed it based on our members and based on, I suppose, people working in projects and we've tried to mix as well what I often call this Pracadamic.

So there may be some academic stuff on there, but also mixing in what's going to resonate with practitioners and actually be helpful for people working in the field. And I think now we've got currently just under 20 different topics on there anything from benefits management, project controls, stakeholder engagement, stakeholder management, all of those quite interesting topics. And I think the beauty of it is that you can go at your own pace. You can track your learn. You can use that via CPD log, particularly if you're charted.

You need to do a certain number of hours each year. So we're just trying to bring everything together that's going to help people deliver projects better ultimately.

So it's really interesting. You just brought up a term that I've hardly ever heard. The first time I heard it was in Limerick, Ireland. You said P academic, and I call myself a academic. So I view it as a practitioner and an academic. Right. I've got a lot on the academic, a lot in the industry and a Pracadamic, I think, is a great term for certain people. So I appreciate you bringing that up. The other thing on APM Learning just in general, on APM site. You know, PMI has some freeware tools.

If you go to APM, are there things? If you're not a member, you can get free or do you have to be a member? Can you go there and Hunt and fish around and just get an idea and get a feel for? Oh, I like this. I like that. And now I want to become a member as possible I know, limited with COVID, too. So I know you probably made some changes with that, but any thoughts there?

Yeah. No, there's a lot. We've got a lot of just freely available stuff. So we've got webinars pretty much there's tools, three webinars a month. Some of them are restricted to members, but mostly they're open to everyone. There's a lot of content on there. There's a YouTube channel of a lots of video content on there, which I think these days I keep being told that Jen said and Jen, I don't like reading stuff. They like watching stuff. We're even doing things on TikTok. Now we're just trying that out.

I'm sure that's freely available, but obviously it's aimed, I guess, at a certain generation, but definitely there's a whole host of resources. In some ways there's probably too much stuff and we need to catalog it better. But definitely I think our search function works really well. So if you type something in on the website and the search, you will get good search results that come up. And I'd say nine times out of ten, what you'll what will come up will be freely accessible.

No, that's great. And one other area I saw on your website that I didn't look at so much, but I think it would be of interest of people listening to. This is career development. And I think that's really unique that you have a whole section to career development and different things in that area. So any comments there on that section?

Yeah. So we've actually got a job board where actually we've got some really good quality jobs that get advertised and the advertisers or the employees that are advertising on there really want access to the qualified members that we've got. So that's a real win win. And then we've got lots of careers advice. I think we've got testimonials from various people at different stages. We've also got, I think, case studies from different employers that we've got an early emerging careers network. I should call it so an interesting that we didn't call it young young project managers because actually, they're not all young.

So it's emerging project management professionals, because as I said before, what we're finding here in the UK, it's often people moving into the profession, perhaps from a different discipline. And that's really interesting because I think they bring something unique, each of them to the profession as well. But then often they want to meet other people starting out or they want to hear from employers. So we've got a lot of, you know, engagement, a lot of virtual engagement as well at the moment, with that sort of emerging professional network.

That's great. So switching gears a kind of an obvious question. But the whole code in how has covet impacted membership and qualifications and the ability to do work and what have been the opportunities and things that maybe worked well.

Yeah. Really good question. Actually. Thanks for that. Michael, one of the biggest challenges we had right at the start was just the fact that all our exams were sat in classrooms and written on paper. So suddenly people couldn't get together. It was locked down. And finally enough, we've already started work on having an online exam portal, but it wasn't going to be ready for another six months. So we had to sort of really accelerate that to get candidates been able to take their exams online, we were able to get it up and running, probably in about two months.

So obviously we lost. I would say we lost quite a bit of momentum in our qualifications. That was just it wasn't a priority for lots of businesses and learners. So that took a hit. Our membership stayed stable. If anything, it actually even grew a little bit because I guess maybe people were feeling uncertain or they had a bit more time on their hands. They wanted to do work on their careers. Well, they had a bit more time, and while they're at home. So we were quite pleased with how our membership and even our corporate members held up.

That held up really well. And that was really, to be honest, to saving Grace for us. We were all ready, I think, pretty attune with doing Webinars and working virtually. We already had Ms teams, but funny enough, everyone was coming into the office pretty much five days a week. That's been quite interesting. We're just now getting back into a sort of hybrid working pattern and feeling our way. Our membership now is still growing, and our qualifications are just bouncing back to where they were sort of to pre COVID levels and Chartered applications the same, I think actually during COVID, they held up pretty well just again, people had a bit more time to invest in themselves.

But I think fundamentally, what I would say is that the sectors that predominantly APM sort of caters to construction infrastructure, the built environment. So it energy. Those weren't really impacted. So we weren't, let's say, overly exposed to, say, hospitality or aviation. So I think we were able to sort of adapt, but yeah, moving a lot of things online quickly. So lots of Webinars, lots of online resources. So it probably just accelerated a lot of that digitalization journey that we were on anyway. But we just sort of brought it around much, much quicker, which actually, in hindsight, it's been a real benefit.

And speaking of the digital area, what is APM thoughts from digital space, AI, machine learning, anything there that you're looking at? I know every company is looking at it. We're all doing it to some extent, but any concerted efforts with that, I know, even where I'm at, I'm trying to get project managers to be more digital, their mindset and how they're doing things because data is everywhere, and we're all dealing with data, even whatever we call it big data, data science, AI, any comments there. Yeah.

A couple of comments. Two things really. So the first is that as we're an educational charity and a charted body, we invest quite a lot of our income back into research that benefit. So some recent studies that we've done is around projecting the future. And I think there were eight discussion papers and one of them, I think, was AI and data. And just what's the implications for the profession? The other was around the 100 year lifespan. So we've looked at a lot of these sort of futuristic topics, and we call it project in the future.

But that's the beauty of projects, isn't it? That is about delivering the future and the future is always going to be in the future. And then the other thing I would say on that is that we're just in the process of refreshing our competence framework and Funnily enough, we did a big consultation exercise with employers, with members, with volunteers, and they would probably two or three things that came out of that. One was the data and that digital mindset needs to be now a competence. The second was actually some of those softer skills are quite important for project management.

So leadership skills, that emotional intelligence. So we've had to think, how do we incorporate that? And then the third one is sort of around sustainability, obviously, as project managers, you're there to deliver the project. But I think it's encouraging that mindset of challenging. If you've got the project brief that says, I'll use this material and do you think, actually there'd be a better material, it's having the confidence to challenge some of those things we've seen. I don't know if you're aware of the sort of Grenfell Tower disaster.

Yeah. There's a lot of work going on here in the UK to sort of make sure that standards are raised within sort of projects, construction and obviously across the board as well. So I think some of those competencies are going to become more and more important for project professionals.

No, I would agree. And you had brought up a comment earlier on APM focused on project program portfolios. But what about PMOs, PMOs? There's a lot of PMOs, but they don't always get a lot of visibility, anything that you're working on with PMO or any thoughts there.

Yeah. Well, exactly as I said, we want to kind of develop the breadth of the profession because we realize it actually is beyond just project programs and portfolios. And is things like project controls, procurement, governance, sponsorship? Pmos, there's so many areas or specialist areas. So at the moment, we're working on we're working on some specialist certificates. So we think that PMO may merit being one of those specialists sort of topics that we would then developer a certificate that would be positioned between our PP and charter ship.

So we're looking at quite a senior level. But yeah, we think and then developing those in a number of other specialist areas, so they may not we don't think there'll ever be mass market. But we think again, it's all about developing that framework, isn't it, for the whole profession and to give people those opportunities to have that professional recognition and designation as well. And finally enough, just at the moment, we're supporting, I think, two PMO conferences here in the UK, but there's the house of PMO, there's future PMO.

I know HS two, they have a PMO office, lots of our corporate customers members have POS. So I think it's definitely an area of growth. And like you say, sometimes they don't get the recognition, but actually they're the ones that are orchestrating everything and actually making it happen.

Well, I think PMO is such an interesting price by itself. Where I work, it's a very large company in PMO. If you tell people what does PMO mean, you may get different variations of that versus what you think it is. So that's kind of interesting, but it's definitely evolving and a lot of great work going on around the world with different areas in PMO. What rebec are there any other questions or comments or things that we haven't covered that you may want to touch base on or let people know about APM just I suppose final thing is to say that next year is our 50th anniversary.

So we're planning we've got a few really exciting things in the pipeline. So one of them is we're going to look at sort of 50 inspiring projects of the last 50 years. So I think, Michael, I'll come to you to be one of the contributors for that. So we're asking we sort of want to ask a range of people both in the profession and outside the profession to tell us about three projects or up to three projects that have inspired them. So we want to raise awareness with the wider public about the impact that good project management has on making that difference in society and getting those projects delivered better.

I think it's all we always hear about the projects that go wrong or didn't deliverable, and we hear a lot less about the projects that succeed and have been fantastic. We want to celebrate the impact of projects we're going to have, I think, a list of sort of movers and shakers in the project profession that are people to watch for the future and doing some interesting research, having some research prizes as well as sort of celebrating with our members and stakeholders and really looking to the future as well for the next 50 years.

So quite an exciting time for us. Really?

Yeah. No, that sounds great. And I also want to make a plug. I probably should have done upfront. I am an APM member. I have been for a number of years, and I find it very beneficial. There's a lot of benefits that I get out of it, and that's why I know a little bit about the charter and whatnot I've looked. I've come back to it a couple of times and then time slips away. And whatnot? But there are a lot of really good benefits that APM, as I will say to the magazine that you put out, is very well done.

A lot of rich content, good Editors, good articles. There's always something in there that I learned. So I appreciate that magazine that you do, and there's a lot of good content. So I'm telling people that are listening to this, they should go there and check it out. And, Rebecca, if people want more information, should they contact you directly on LinkedIn or how? How would they get?

Yeah, that mean LinkedIn. That's fine. Or they can look on our website. There's probably some contact information, but absolutely the first step. Look me up on LinkedIn and I can definitely point people in the right direction.

That'd be great. Well, Rebecca, I thank you for your time. I know you're very busy back in the office. We're actually back in the office starting today. I didn't make it in today, but we're starting to do a hybrid model, so I know we're all kind of feeling our way through this pandemic and appreciate your time and want to thank everyone for being on here and look forward to our next installment in two months. And we'll have more information out on the on the PMO Readable website.

So thank you.

It's a pleasure. Thanks, Michael. Thanks, everybody.

Alright. Take care. Bye bye.

You too. Bye bye.