Chapter Award Winners - December 2019 PMI Today

PMI Budapest, Hungarian Chapter

PMI would like to congratulate this year’s Chapter of the Year award winners. Choosing the winners was not an easy decision, as we have seen incredible amounts of growth and opportunity across the globe. Our chapters bring to life PMI’s values and passion for project management and produce tangible and lasting effects on their local communities. It is a joy to support each and every one of our chapters, and we are truly proud of all of the submissions we received. It has been uplifting to read about how different chapters are advancing the project management profession and providing value to our membership.

 

In the first category, for chapters with 25 to 300 members, the PMI Budapest, Hungarian Chapter was announced the winner at the PMI® Leadership Institute Meeting–North America. In their own words, this is why the PMI Budapest, Hungarian Chapter felt they should win this award:

Sixteen years ago, the cradle of our chapter was HP Hungary Ltd. That was the time when our founding members recognized the need for a local community where project management practitioners could network, meet and learn from each other. The first meetings were followed by entertainment and establishment of the PMI Budapest, Hungarian Chapter on 14 November 2003. In the last 15 years or so, we have worked hard to prove to our local project management community that PMI is not only the largest not-for-profit project management organization, but that it is also the best of its kind. We started several programs, including the Project Manager of the Year Award, the Project Management Final Thesis Award, a monthly project management tea meeting, the Project Management Roundtable Conference, the Art of Projects Conference, participation in translations of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) and the Agile Practice Guide, a project management pedagogy program based on PMIEF material and much more. 

We are the most successful and largest international project management community in Hungary. We have grown from 160 chapter members to over 300 members in the last 18 months. Our chapter member retention rate is very high, at 79.21%. The number of PMI certification holders in Hungary increased significantly between 2018 and 2019. There are now 230 PMI certification holders in our chapter. We became the largest international project management community in Hungary in 2019. Our quarterly “Pulse Member Satisfaction Survey” proves that we are on the right track. Our chapter president was the VP of operations between 2012 and 2015; he became the PMI region mentor in Eastern Europe between 2015 and 2018, and he has been leading the chapter for 18 months now. He has attended all PMI EMEA and North America Leadership Institute Meetings and Region 8 meetings in the last four years and brought everything he learned abroad back home.

 

Our Art of Projects Conference is the largest English-speaking conference in Central Europe, with over 200 participants. Every year we organize over 20 different events in Hungary. The PMI Budapest, Hungarian Chapter events meet the highest standards all the time. We signed the ECC initiative and started an ECC cooperation with the PMI Central Italy Chapter, the PMI Southern Germany Chapter and the PMI Ukraine Chapter. Every month, on average, there are over 150 webinar attendees; in one year, over 3,000 participants attend our events. We started a cooperation with the PMI Austria Chapter, the PMI Czech Republic Chapter and the PMI Slovakia Chapter and together we organized the Light-Up 360 international event in Vienna, Austria, this year on 6 September 2019.

 

We have over 15 years of legacy and serve our chapter members and the larger project management community in Hungary. But this didn’t all happen by accident. Back in 2018, we started a brand new chapter in our history. After long hours of discussions, meetings and debates we decided that we should lower the chapter membership fee from US$50 to US$25. We also decided that we would increase the number of our chapter members by at least 100%. We reached this ambitious goal within 18 months. Our local chapter goals and mission are in line with PMI goals and we are fully committed to the project management profession.