EastEnders or The West Wing - that was my choice on the evening of Tuesday 29 September (and I am not referring to The West Wing of the White House made famous by the American political drama of the same name). It was The West Wing Community Arts centre in Slough, where with about seventy of my fellow Programme & Project managers, I attended our annual Slough joint event between O2 and the Association for Project Management. This year's event was entitled "Credit Crunching Project Management" and we were joined all evening by the Mayor of Slough, councillor Jagjit Grewal...

I was welcomed by the delightful Sue & Nat from the APM. As an ice breaker, I was asked to provide a couple of words, about me, that could be printed on my name badge... I was quite nervous taking the badge as I had made the rather rash decision to supply "Spinal Tap". Would my open display of love for hard rock ostracize me from my grey suited colleagues? I am glad to say nothing could be further from the truth, and I enjoyed many interesting conversations on a whole range of subjects from Spinal Tap to snowboarding to playing the saxophone all whilst munching on my salmon blinis, and enjoying a rather fruity glass of white wine.

The event was sponsored by Smart421, and Steve Meek was our host for the evening. Our first speaker was Phil Willcox from O2. This was Phil's first time as a speaker at an APM event, not that you would have known it from his confidence and presence on stage. Phil's presentation "Managing in a Credit Crunch" took us to MoScoW, and then up to the Moon via Apollo 13, and finally back to earth with a musical bang with Mick Hucknell. Quiet how he fitted it all into 30 minutes, I will never know.

Our next speaker, Tom Taylor is a legend on the APM speaker circuit, and his presentation lived up his reputation. Tom is a vice chairman of the APM and a published author on the subject of recession and project management. He took us through his presentation on "Recession Survival, Recovery Topics & Beyond" with the help of his cartoon characters Ollie & Sally. We journeyed from the three day week, up and through the dot com bubble, right up to the present day. He gave us the opportunity to think about what we could do for our companies and ourselves during these challenging economic times.

We rounded off the evening with a question and answer session with our speakers who were joined by Sarah Craig from O2 and Keith Grawler, the Chairman of the local Chilterns branch of the APM. Sarah, I was to discover is one of the 21st centuries un-sung heroes who helped bring us Law & Order & NCIS, as she lead the project team who rolled out Channel 5.

I'd like to thank Steve Meek from Smart421, Tom Taylor & Keith Grawler and Phil Willcox & Sarah Craig from O2 for a making it a great evening. I am glad to say I made the right choice - it beat EastEnders hands down!

If you would like to see pictures from the event, please click here

This is the 4th event that O2 has run in conjunction with the Association of Project Managers. The events are run annually, in the Leeds and Slough areas. I, for one, will be keeping an eye open for the next joint event which will be in the New Year. Details will be advertised in Technology Snippets and on the APM website.