Dear friend and colleague,

I thank all of you who were able to make it to the May chapter meeting.  It proved to be vibrant.

I have been in China over the past few days stopping in Hong Kong before flying to Chengdu which is China's fourth largest city after Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou (pronounced Guanjo). To be honest with you the scale of development here is alarming. They have really got it right here: Government provides large scale infrastructure and business excels in an environment where enterprise is encouraged - simple but amazing protocol. Government looks after infrastructure and business uses the infrastructure.  Some of the things that amazed me are as follows:

• China's population is 1.6bn - That is 10 times as many Nigerians. It also means that for every 7 persons that exist on earth, there is one from China.

• Chengdu the capital of Sichuan province has a population of 30m and its province has 80m people (it’s like saying Ikeja and and Lagos State)

With these numbers in mind the scale of development is visionary and alarming. For instance the government has built skyscrapers which all look alike all over the city to house residents... they are typically 40-storey buildings with the first 5 floors as car parks. This is the same in Hong Kong which has very little land mass but is endowed with some of the most awe-inspiring skyscrapers anywhere in the world. This is a government that believes building large scale infrastructure and for business to run and manage. It boasts of The International Commerce Centre which has 118 floors.

And all these developments I have seen are based on project management excellence. The Chinese people have an insatiable appetite to be number one in the world. They are a race that is based on copy technology, but where they significantly differ is that they spend vast fortunes in research and development - so they better what they initially copied. The fact that a country with so many people can get into this kind of rapid development shows that there is hope for Nigeria. We have to keep pushing the agenda forward - greater awareness of the benefits of project management!

I am also excited about the Job Fair that we intend to have on 31 October. Shortly members of the board are going to start the road show of getting employers to come to the event. I am positive that we will bring changes to lives as we do this for a first time. Please note that only bona fide current members of the local chapter will be allowed to attend the Job Fair.  If you are aware of any companies whop will be interested in this, please let us know.

I am also quite pleased to let you know that at long last we have some traction on the revamping of the website. We have engaged an external company to assist us in the development and a volunteer, Sundar Shastry, is managing the project. We are going to make it as intuitive as possible and will require a content manager – we will need an experienced volunteer for that – is that you?

The World Café exercise as certainly caused a stir amongst the board. We have almost 200 ideas in total for the 4 statements that directly affect our chapter. It was quite scary to note that we have all this wisdom in us. This has obviously created a new dimension of work for us and therefore we need a volunteer with PMO experience. Are you interested, please apply to vpvolunteer@pmilagos.org.

The think-tank for the IPM Day 2012 is also underway and in the next few weeks we should let you have details of this exiting day. We are back to project manager of the year! Who is that special person? It promises to be more exciting than the previous one.

In the interim, I wish you a glorious month

Deji West (President)