Technical conferences and shows are a part of an engineer’s work- ing life. He or she has to attend all pertinent events that would
help to stay in touch and to compete in his or her field of exper- tise. I always encouraged my team members to go to technical conferences and shows as long as they were planned well ahead of time and they were accounted for in the project’s schedule. All companies that I worked for had well- defined rules, procedures, and budgets for attending technical conferences and shows. If you were making a presentation at a session, you always got priority to attend. If you already attended a certain conference or a show the year before, management would give priority to someone else in your field the following year. If you had a critical deadline or an event at the company, you had to forgo the week at the conference or at the show. Sometimes there were company cash flow issues, which restricted travel expenses and the number of attendees to technical conferences and shows. I remember going to one confer- ence on my own dime.
During my career, I came across several surprising occurrences to my team members regarding technical conferences and shows. All these surprising occurrences affected the progress of my proj- ect at that time. In one such case, four out of eight engineers working for me on a yearlong project came to my office one day with smiling faces and informed me that they had gotten approval from their managers to attend the Comdex show the following week, a computer exposition show that occurred annually in Las Vegas. I was dumbfounded. I told them that they should have first consulted me before approaching their managers. My project was in a crunch time. All they thought about was a fun week at Comdex in Las Vegas. They forgot all about their responsibilities to my project. I did not want to put my weight down, cancel their attendance to Comdex, and disappoint them. We had to find a solution together. I went over each engineer’s tasks. If three of the engineers worked 60 hours per week for two weeks after the show, they could catch up to the project’s schedule and would not cause any harm. So three of the engineers were okay to go, but one test engineer had to perform crucial training for two Malaysian engi- neers during the week of the show. The Malaysian engineers were already at our plant and they were scheduled to fly back to their country immediately after the training. I had another test engi- neer on my team. I decided to bring him into our meeting too to see if he could help us out of the bind we were in. We went over the training tasks one by one. The other test engineer agreed to take over the following week’s training tasks. He agreed to work an extra 20 hours the following week so that his teammate could
attend Comdex. That was good camaraderie in a project environ- ment. I agreed to let four engineers attend Comdex the following week. I advised them to approach such a technical conference or show requests in the future in a timely fashion by considering all of their project responsibilities.
Another surprise came from an urgent replacement presenter at the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) annual conference of industrial electronics in Europe. A physi- cist at our company became ill and could not fly on an airplane to Europe. My upper management decided to send a replace- ment. The upper management decided to send one of my team members without consulting me or my team member. The vice president of engineering called me and my team member to his office and explained the need for the replacement presenter at the upcoming conference in three days. According to my upper management, my team member was the best- qualified replace- ment presenter in our company. What could I say? What could my team member say? We could not object to such an emergency request. I told the vice president that I was going to sit down with my team member and find a way to get him to go to the confer- ence in Europe in three days without affecting his duties on my project. I had to take over my team member’s project responsi- bilities for the next 10 days. I heard that he did a great job as the replacement presenter at the conference in Europe and my project had a minor setback.
A strange case happened regarding a Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Apparently, a project team member of mine was a regular attendee at this annual show. He thought that one week every year at CES was a given to him by our company. He did not even bother to inform me about his CES attendance at the begin- ning of the project. I scheduled a critical design review meeting with our customer, which unfortunately coincided with the CES week. He came to my office a couple of weeks before the show and told me that he made his arrangements to attend the CES. I was quite surprised. I told him that we were going to have a critical design review during that week with our customer and he had to be present at that meeting. I insisted that everything was set up with our customer and he could not go to the CES. He had to cancel all arrangements that he had made for the show. He was very upset, left my office, and went to his supervisor to complain. His supervisor called me to discuss the conflict. After I explained the details of the case, his supervisor agreed with me that critical
design review took priority and canceled his engineer’s trip to CES. It was an unfortunate coincidence, but if he had declared his plans to me at the beginning of the project, then I could have scheduled the critical design review accordingly.
As project managers, we have to encourage our team mem- bers to attend technical conferences and shows as long as they are within our company’s guidelines. However, we have to establish with our team members who is going where at the beginning of the project. It is our responsibility to balance our project’s respon- sibilities with technical conferences and shows.
LESSONS LEARNED FROM THIS PROJECT EVENT
• Every team member’s schedule for attending technical conferences and shows should be on our project schedule from the start.
• We, as project managers, have to balance fairly an engi- neer’s wish to attend a technical conference and/ or a show with his or her project responsibilities.