The Clermont Function Room of the Discovery Suites was the venue for the PMI Philippines Chapter 3rd technical session for the year.  Held last September 2, 2008, the session was entitled "Global Project Execution", and was presented by Mr. Rolando C. Lawas, PMP, of Fluor Daniel Inc. Philippines.

The evening's events started with a short presentation by this year's NOMELEC chairman, Mr. Chito Torres, who gave the attendees a quick, but detailed, overview of the nomination and elections for the PMI Philippine Chapter Inc. Board of Trustees for 2008.

Chito Torres, 2008 NOMELEC Chairman, gives an overview of the nominations and elections process.

Patrick Ferrer, PMI Philippines Chapter President, introducing Mr. Lawas.

Mr. Lawas, who was accompanied by FDIP GM Mr. Dan Spinks plus a couple of colleagues, presented his company's methodology to executing projects globally using talent from their offices around the world. This methodology, called Global Project Execution, provides a collaborative project environment on a worldwide basis with different offices creating a virtual project team. GPE (also called as "worksharing") is designed to have a single virtual team whose members are located in different workshare offices worldwide but have only ONE clear leader.  The project manager stays in the lead office and is in charge of managing the parallel engineering and design efforts in the other workshare offices.  The concept boils down to having "distributed work".

Rolando Lawas.

GPE has worked so well for Fluor, increasing productivity of resources and maintaining its global presence with clients.  It has translated into competitive production costs and improved the flexibility of the organization. As Mr. Lawas said "we are not moving the people, but we're moving the work".  To make global execution work well, Fluor has invested heavily in the use of appropriate information technology tools, as well as the adoption of global engineering practices by all the workshare offices.

A lengthy Q&A session followed Mr. Lawas' presentation.  Attendees to the session, who come from various disciplines, showed keen interest in learning more about Mr. Lawas and FDIP's experiences and challenges in implementing Global Project Execution.

Download a copy of Mr. Lawas' presentation (Warning: 1.3MB).

More photos through this link (WARNING: large photos).