Dear PMI South Africa Members,
The time has come for me to step down as President of the PMI South Africa Chapter. I announce Tunde Ojo-Aromokudu, as the Acting President, effective 15 January until chapter elections at the AGM later this year. Tunde has been our VP REP Outreach since 2019 and is an effective leader to take over the reins. Tunde will contact you shortly.
It was with much honor and privilege that I have served the Chapter since November 2016. I remain committed to the chapter and passionate about building professional competence in project management in South Africa, with a positive impact on development and transformation. I will take this passion and commitment to my new role with PMI as a PMI Academic Insight Team member, where I hope to contribute to PM development in the region and globally.
My tenure as president has been a journey replete with satisfaction while at the same time challenges, disruption, and pivoting. This past year 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic is a prime example. Due to the impact of covid lockdown, our executive team embarked on a chapter transformation with input from you through our webinars to address chapter member pain points and bring equity in access to all our members' services. Since May 2020, our new way of working (WOW) includes digitized chapter monthly meetings through webinars, which have brought our monthly meetings to all members nationwide. We noted your expressions to benefit from networking with the chapter project management community. Thus, we have created a virtual networking platform on our website, Social Hub for Professionals, now in the testing stage. We are working on a new way of engaging our members through smaller geographic clusters that will enable in-person networking, communication, and knowledge exchange from where you live when it is safe to do so. Watch out for news feeds on the prototyping and testing of this new approach during 2021. Get involved; we are looking for volunteers.
We started the PM Summit in 2017 and have evolved this to a unique event of critical conversations around current PM challenges, themes, concerns, and vanguard thinking where your voices are heard and noted. The 2020 PM Summit engaged us on the theme, Innovation, Digitalization and Agility in the Project Economy, unknowingly preparing our thinking for the events that were to follow after the lockdown. The theme of this year's PM Summit, planned for 27 March 2021, is The Year of Covid-19: Stories of Project Disruption, Learning, and Re-Imagining. The year 2020 was a year of tremendous difficulties, learning, and pivoting, which we must capture. We will learn from each other the lessons in disruption-- how we learned, even through failure, and how we re-imagined our projects to create value and benefits for our stakeholders. It will be virtual; see you there!
Our new acting president, Tunde Ojo-Aromokudu, is assuming responsibility at a pivotal time to lead the execution of our transformation and oversee the continuous improvement of our operations. Provide all the support you can, as the chapter's success in providing services, is your success! As the PM community, let's continue to support each other and move forward together.
The year 2020 was challenging, and we need to hold on a bit longer to cross over into better times. I offer condolences to all who lost loved ones and colleagues, suffered job losses, and experienced general life disruption. As we embark on 2021, I wish you comfort, security, health, restoration, and abundance.
Dr. Lynn A. Keeys, PMP