APM Midlands Corporate Advisory Group

APM Midlands Branch have a corporates sub-committee. This is made up of volunteers who focus their attention on supporting APM Corporate Members (Partners and Affiliates) based, or with a sizeable PM community, in the Midlands to get the best from their membership.

John Williams (Branch Vice-Chair) currently chairs the Corporates Committee and the Midlands Corporate Advisory Group (MCAG). Other volunteer subcommittee members include Sarah Booth, Russell Muir, David Munslow, and Evelyn Phoenix. As well as ad-hoc support to members and APM, the committee put on an annual programme of Corporate Member only MCAG events and Corporate Conferences. They are also proud to have trail-blazed what has now become a nationwide initiative to recognise and reward young and student project professionals in the Midlands.

The MCAG round table events provide heads of PM function from APM corporate members with a unique opportunity to network with and join peers from different organisations and industries to explore a specific topic related to projects, programmes and portfolios. There is usually an expert on the topic on hand to explain best practice before attendees share and discuss their experiences in a round table format.

Events in 2020

On 22nd January 2020 John Williams hosted the APM Midlands Conference at IET Austin Court in Birmingham. Supporting the Big Conversation on Projecting the Future, we introduced the speakers and facilitated Q&A for each session. David Thomson APM Head of External Affairs gave an overview of the Projecting the Future papers. David Atkinson and David Humber of QinetiQ gave a case study on the 4th Industrial Revolution. Tiago Dias and Karen Davis of HS2 gave a case study on Future Workplace and Dr. Andrew Clifton of Rolls Royce have a case study on Sustainability. Debbie Dore, APM CEO, who closed the conference.

In the evening, hot on the heels of the conference we held the 4th Midlands Young Project Professional of the Year Awards with the theme of Projecting the Future. The event was hosted by Sarah Booth of XPO Logistics at IET Austin Court in Birmingham. The event was opened by APM CEO, Debbie Dore, the Keynote presentation was on the subject of The Future of Project Management by Rob Leslie-Carter of Arup. After a panel discussion, and presentations on their projects by the worthy finalists, Nat Thomas from QinetiQ was presented with the winners award.

MCAG 12: Bouncing Back was hosted by online by APM on 28th May, 2020. In this session Richard Fallon of Technology Supply Chain looked at Funded Innovation Support for Midlands companies, and Russell Muir of Rolls Royce shared how they were adapting to the step changes in the Aerospace Industry under a global pandemic.

MCAG 13: The Golden Thread hosted online by APM on 3rd November, 2020. In this session, Daniel Nicholls, APM Research Manager introduced the 3 Golden Thread research papers, before we focused in on the Midlands Engine. Dr. Pam Waddell from Innovation Alliance West Midlands shared how her organisation is supporting growth through innovation, highlighting the importance of collaboration. Emma Carroll-Walsh from the Manufacturing Technology Centre then shared how they are enabling manufacture resilience and discussed some of the skills needed for project management moving forward.

After an engaging panel discussion, we shifted our attention to SMEs. John Williams CPO of ProjExc introduced some of his thinking around the specific challenges facing project managers in SMEs, how they are the biggest population of PMs in the UK and yet disadvantaged when compared to PMs in bigger organisations. This lead to an interesting round table discussion on what we could and should be doing as a profession to better support SME project managers.