Chapter Meeting

Mike Saxton and Patrick Shore

Tips, Tricks, & Traps – Practical Application of Your PM Toolkit

About the Program:

Book smart vs. street smart. Do your Project Managers (PM) know how to use their skills effectively without getting bogged down in “administrivia”? Not every tool and practice applies to every situation. Without assessing the project and plotting how to effectively structure and manage it, project management “best practices” can become your worst enemy.

A seasoned project manager has learned how to assess and how to configure his/her project management team and toolkit to best manage each specific effort. Often the PM will step in where another has departed or failed. This session will discuss practical application of the Project Health Check as well as other tips, tricks and traps of effective project management.

Lessons from the battlefield on:

• Conducting health checks to kickoff or salvage a project
• Professional vs. personal correctness and courtesy
• How to deliver bad news
• Rules-based escalation and notification
• Other practical approaches to project management

Speaker Biography

Mr. Mike Saxton is the Executive Vice President of IntelliThink, LLC and brings 17 years of experience and expertise in organizational design and transformation for the entire business model: process, people, and technology to streamline operations, reduce costs and drive increased profits across expanded markets. Mike holds a Bachelor of Science degree in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Southern California. He earned a Department of Energy certification in nuclear engineering and later a master's degree in business administration from Duke University .

Mr. Saxton also held manager and executive roles across Sprint’s wireline and wireless divisions driving numerous organizational design and turnaround efforts. Highlights include: developing and implementing the strategic planning and performance management processes for a post-reorganization, 7,000 person technology organization; supervising marketing operations teams defining and executing marketing programs and product trials/launches; completely rebuilding and reorienting sales teams to lead 30% of representatives to President’s Club (top five percent) within two years; chief architect developing a $448 million business case and its operational model: the capability to sell, deliver and service a new customer segment and product set.

With IntelliThink, Mike leads sales, marketing, partner and talent acquisition & development while also serving IntelliThink’s clients to redesign and define new processes, develop human talent and supporting technology management capabilities.

Mr. Patrick Shore is the President and CEO of IntelliThink, LLC. He has more than 20 years of business solution experience. Patrick is a dynamic visionary widely recognized for creative leadership in defining and developing thought provoking business process, organization, and technology solutions that enhance a company’s ability to be successful.

As senior director of account management with Sprint PCS, Mr. Shore managed a staff of 49 employees and seven (7) contractors to define and implement an Account Management function that supported nine business departments to develop business strategies, define new concept development, prioritize projects, develop new business cases, and manage the investment portfolio. Through other executive roles in Sales and Marketing Services as well as Decision Support, Patrick managed a geographically dispersed staff of 280 employees and 48 contractors in Kansas City, Dallas, & Chicago with an expense budget of $19,500,000 (travel, training, consulting, etc.) and a capital budget of $68,000,000 (hardware, system software and 3rd party software).

In his Decision Support role, Patrick managed project development and operations support for 14 applications supporting two business divisions with 2000 internal clients. Key successes included:
1) developing the concept, strategy and construction plans for a multi-division customer data warehouse application providing a single view of customer information, data acquisition and loading, household tagging and demographic modeling for campaign execution and business intelligence reporting and
2) managing the formulation of a One-Sprint data warehouse strategy encompassing a staging hub, subject matter repositories, enterprise client-id process, modeling environment, exploration zone, distribution hub, and on-line multi-dimensional reporting and
3) defining and implemented a Software Process improvement program centered on the Capability Maturity Model. Active components included requirements management, software project planning, project management, risk management and configuration management.