Project Governance and Controls Symposium 2016.

We are only a few weeks out from PGCS 2016 and this year’s  Symposium is shaping up to be the best yet.  The Symposium will be held in its usual ADFA, Canberra venue on Wed. 11th and Thur. 12th May 2016.

Governing for performance was the key theme of the AICD’s Australian Governance Summit held in Sydney last month. But organisations cannot perform sustainably if they cannot govern and control their projects effectively.  Unfortunately as the Shergold Report has highlighted (consistent with the findings of many other surveys), most organisations struggle to achieve the full potential value from their projects and programs – literally $billions are wasted annually by poorly governed and controlled projects.

PGCS was created to focus on the gap between intention and delivery – and to help build Australia capability in the governance and management of projects by providing a forum for the exchange of ideas between international experts, leading Australian practitioners, the people responsible for governing projects within their organisations, and the people responsible for making the governance and controls systems work.

The 2016 program is on target to fulfil this ambitious objective 100%:

• We have speakers from the UK National Audit Office and the Australian National Audit Office, both of who lead the push for improved performance in government projects.
• Controls and surveillance of projects is well covered with both international and Australian experts. Lisa Wolf’s pre-symposium Masterclass ‘A Practical Guide to Project and Contract Surveillance’ is a sell out, fortunately Lisa is also one of our Keynote Speakers.
• The needs and expectations of organisational governors is covered by among others, Ms. Jane Halton the Secretary of the Australian Department of Finance who will be outlining her perspectives on improving the performance of major projects.
• AIPM, PMI, IPMA and ICCPM are all supporting the Symposium and providing high quality speakers.
• We have our inaugural Academic Stream – this aspect of the Symposium will become increasingly important as we direct any surplus funds towards Australian based research into the governance and control of projects and programs.
• And there’s more – click through to our program page to download the full event program.

Thanks to the ongoing support of our Platinum Sponsor, The University of New South Wales (UNSW), Canberra, the cost of the symposium, including 2 full days and our reception at the ADFA Offices Mess is only $990 (early bird available prior to the 25^th April).

To make the learning opportunity provided by the Symposium available to more junior staff, we also have a unique 2-for-1 offer in place with a number of ‘supporting organisations’; each senior manager who registers can nominate a more junior staff member to attend the Symposium at no additional cost (We are always happy to extend this arrangement to new organisations).

PGCS is designed to be a very different type of event compared to the traditional, and well loved, annual conferences run by the major associations – we are very focused on accessing and creating knowledge focused on ‘governance and controls’ – as part of this process all of the available papers from previous years are also made available to attendees and others via our on-line library.

The open question is can you afford to miss this world class event?  For more information visit our website at: http://www.pgcs.org.au/

Note: Patrick Weaver is a member of the PGCS Organising Committee.