Ciklum Hosts Second Educational PM Camp

Online, May 31, 2010 (Newswire.com) - KYIV, Ukraine - Ciklum reports on its second Educational PM Camp held on the 23-24 of April, 2010 in Kyiv. About 100 project leaders, 5 Ciklum clients, and a couple of renowned trainers from Ukraine and Russia gathered together to share knowledge and experience within Ciklum Community.

Ciklum PM Camp is part of Ciklum's knowledge sharing initiatives where the clients and employees are meant to share their knowledge and experience within the development and the outsourcing business to achieve better understanding of each other and the market and greater cost savings.

The two days camp was a mix of presentations, panel discussions, workshops and an informal networking over meals.

- "This is the fourth time we host an educational PM event at Ciklum, second time in this format. In the past we had it more academically focused, where the program was stretched into two hours sessions per week over a couple of month. It lacked the community feeling, the enthusiasm of the crowd, the bonding part, and most importantly, the hands on real life experience. Today we have found the niche to success and are continuously gathering feedback to make it what our developers and clients need," says Marina Vyshegorodskikh, Ciklum's HR Director.

Among many interesting workshops and sessions a few are worth noting. The presentation by Artem Serduyk, a SCRUM Maser and Agile coach from ICM Ukraine, titled the "Root cause analysis to disappointment with negotiations" has received a tremendous success amongst the participants and is planed already to be included in the next camp.

The panel discussion was also a revelation platform for many to be remembered. The feedback from the employees included:

- I really started thinking about why I don't get high-level tasks and what can I do about that. I've never thought of it much.
- I like to hear opinions of people who have some achievements in the industry. Lectors have mostly theoretical knowledge, but these people have practical ones.

The panelists, who were Ciklum's clients and Top management, were focusing on the following hot issues identified by Ciklum's PMs:

* Investing into PM's development further or investing in "maturing" of the team as the old trend of the centralized control seems to be giving in to a shared responsibility and distributed control
* How to find and keep motivated people and avoid motivating people?
* What do PMs have to improve at so that more business comes to Ukraine?

- "Why do we do this? Because we want to narrow the gap in business understating between our developers and our international clients. Even though we have relatively small business and cultural differences as if to compare European countries and say India and China, our experience shows that the difference in understanding still exist and it comes from us all having different point of references. That could be the society, upbringing, education, culture, etc.," says Marina Vyshegorodskikh, Ciklum HR Director.

This time around the camp was also a testing platform for two other brand new community knowledge sharing initiatives at Ciklum: Speaker's Corner and Business Value Game. The first one being more of a social every Wednesday gathering at Ciklum office where volunteers will be presenting interesting topics that would be open for discussion with the attendees. The Business Value Game on the other hand is a team building and learning experience focused on the team solving real case studies meant to improve teams' business understanding.