Hello PPMA colleagues and friends

This week’s blog post is an update on our 2 day PPMA Policy Board meeting,held last week. Long-time PPMA members will know that PPMA Policy Board always takes the opportunity to make one of the quarterly board meetings a 2 day event to give us a longer opportunity to get together and look at how well we are doing against our business plan and to start thinking through some of the emerging themes that our members need to be aware of.

I’ve been reflecting on the event and cannot believe how quickly the first few months of my Presidential term has gone! In many respects it’s been a whirlwind but I’m very pleased about the progress we have been making. Board meetings are always important events in any President’s year – it’s an opportunity to make sure we are on track with our key themes for the year, but also to think strategically about our business plan and make sure that we are comfortable it is fit for purpose. I thoroughly enjoyed the 2 day event. Taking that amount of time out of the office is a big commitment, but it’s time very well spent. You might remember that a previous Past President, Angela O’Connor said at this year’s conference, that one of the key things leaders need to do is to take time out to reflect, talk, share and discuss. I’m a great advocate of this anyway, but doing this role as well as may day job has made me value thinking space all the more.

We covered a lot last week. I’ve spoken before about the relationships we are building with other partners – we continue to make great progress here. That will continue and I’m grateful for the support of my colleagues in this important endeavour. To give you a taster of what we covered last week, we:

  • finalised a new sponsor structure which will make our sponsorship opportunities more transparent and we’re going to be launching this for new sponsors in time for 2018 conference
  • agreed which Board members are going to sponsor our research topics
  • talked about the progress we’re making on phase 2 website development, which are planned to go live at the end of October
  • had a lot of discussion about how best to run our national and regional events, especially as we’re talking to HPMA, Civil Service and CIPD about opening up these events to all of our respective members.

On a final note for this blog, I wanted to give you a heads up that we will be launching conference 2018 booking and our 2018 Awards in October.  We’re doing this a bit earlier this year based on feedback we had from you last year. For a range of reasons last year was very very busy and we want to give you a little bit more planning time this year, particularly around getting award submissions ready.

As ever, I encourage you to keep up to speed with our weekly blogs and the website.  f you have any thoughts, comments or would like to share the great work you are doing you can contact us on [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected].