I started this podcast because I wanted to have more of the conversations I was having at conferences. And I wanted more people to hear them.
It started in Galveston
My first in-person major-project conference was Project Control Summit in Galveston, Texas, in April 2024. I attended, I presented, and I met a lot of people doing really interesting work.
I'm a techie. I came into this space from the technology side, and there were plenty of people at that conference whose world was quite different from mine. I wasn't a Texas local, either. But Shohreh Ghorbani and Kamran Akbarzadeh made me feel welcome.
Through Project Control Academy and the Summit, they'd already been bringing people together online before getting everyone together in Texas. They were happy to see people meet each other, share what they knew and build their own communities. As an outsider coming into this space, I really appreciated that.
Project Control SummitThe conference where this all started for me.Visit the Summit ↗
There was a lot happening in the hallways
There were great presentations, but there were also all these conversations happening around them. People had practical advice, stories from their projects and ideas I wanted to hear more about.
Some of it was the street smarts you don't really get from a textbook. Someone has tried an approach, dealt with the problems and figured out a way through. That's useful knowledge. It's also interesting to hear how they got there, including the parts that didn't go especially well.
I kept thinking there should be another place for these conversations. A podcast would let us spend some time with a person and their experience, ask follow-up questions and share it with people who couldn't be at the conference.
So that was reason number one. I was hearing all this great stuff, and I wanted more people to get to hear it.
I wanted to have the conversation, too
The second reason was a bit more personal. I wanted to have these conversations myself.
I've gone to conferences as a vendor and a consultant. I enjoy meeting people, but there's sometimes a bit of distance there. You can be having a good conversation and still sense the question in the background: what's the angle? Is there a pitch coming?
I understand that. People working on major projects get approached a lot. But sometimes I just want to hear about what someone's doing. I want to ask questions, learn something and get to know them without needing a commercial outcome from it.
I wanted a place to contribute without that sense of a pitch waiting in the wings. The podcast gave me a way to reach out to people whose work interested me, ask questions and learn from them. That's something I get a lot out of personally, too.
Kim showed me how it could work
I met Kim Essendrup at that first Summit. Like me, he was there as a vendor and a presenter. His session followed mine, and we got talking.
Kim co-hosts Project Management Happy Hour with Kate Anderson. He encouraged me to start a podcast, and we kept talking about it in a meeting in May 2024. He sent over examples of Show Me Your RAIDLOG and the template script they used.
Having an actual script to look at was really helpful. I could start to picture how I'd put a conversation together. He'd already figured out a lot of the practical stuff and was happy to share it.
He later joined me on the podcast for our Risk 101 conversation about RAID logs. Thanks, Kim. You really helped me get started.
Project Management Happy HourKim Essendrup and Kate Anderson's podcast. A big part of the inspiration for getting mine going.Listen to Happy Hour ↗
Then Omar gave me a nudge
I went back to Project Control Summit in 2025 and moderated a panel on digital transformation in project controls. Omar Habib, who has since come on the podcast to talk about BIM, was one of the panelists.
I had a lot of fun preparing the questions and getting everyone into the discussion. Afterwards, Omar told me he thought I'd done a good job and encouraged me to do more of it.
Maybe he's just a really complimentary guy, but it meant a lot to me. I'd been thinking about the podcast for a while, and that encouragement really kicked me into gear.
A thank-you, and more conversations to come
I see the podcast as a complement to conferences. I still want to go, meet people and hear what they're working on. The show gives us something we can do between those gatherings, and a way to bring more people into the conversation.
PodBOK comes from a similar place. We have industry standards and established approaches, and we have people who've tried to make them work on real projects. Putting those together in a guide seems useful to me. Here's the approach, and here's what people who've done it think you should know.
And have a look at Project Control Academy, too. Shohreh and Kamran have built training and resources there to help people level up in project controls. The conference is one part of what they've created for this community.
So a big thank-you to Shohreh, Kamran and Project Control Summit. You welcomed me, and the community you brought together gave me both the idea and the encouragement to do this.
And thanks to everyone who's joined me or listened. If there's something from your own experience you think we should talk about, I'd love to hear it.