Do You Think You Are a Good Listener? Let Us Surprise You! 

 
You have all of the basic listening skills mastered. You focus, make eye contact, repeat back to clarify.  Yet, are you the best listener that you can be? Have you considered the impact of YOUR perspective, YOUR methods of processing information, YOUR world view, YOUR experiential history, and even your physiology on how and what you hear and understand? Come to listen in this session and leave knowing that you could have listened more effectively! This session will provide both serious and amusing examples of listening - good and bad.
 

Learning Objectives:

• Appraise how you listen and what that means to you and to those to whom you listen
• Identify and assess characteristics about yourself that may impact your ability to listen and, if attended to, will help you to become a much more effective listener, program/project manager, and analyst
• Heighten your listening skills using new information

Speakers: 

Sandy Sears, PMP, CBAP, PMI-PBA,SA, CCP is the Director, Commercial Business Unit, for Robbins Gioia, and is a member of the Business Analysis practice. As a former executive at a large insurance company, Sandy was responsible for IT process and practice development and was a key player in a large IT transformation effort, leading the rollout of project management, business analysis, and testing practices and tools across the organization. She also led the development of standardized processes for project portfolio management, IT financial management, and the solution delivery life cycle. At a previous company, she received the prestigious Chairman's Award for her work in introducing a new annuity product line in Tokyo, Japan. She has been a speaker at industry conferences and for professional and education organizations. She was featured in Kitty Haas' book Breakthrough Business Analysis.

Carol Drew, CBAP, SA is Senior Business Analyst at Robbins Gioia. She is a founding member of the Pittsburgh IIBA Chapter, and has served on the board as VP of Programs, President and Past President. She was a reviewer of the IIBA BABOK 3.0 and she loves helping individuals and organizations find value in Business Analysis. Her skill set spans facilitating business requirements sessions to serving in the key role of developing technical solutions. As a certified business analysis professional, her responsibilities include elicitation and presentation of information for project team review, collaboration, commenting and approval. Additional responsibilities include analyzing requirements lifecycle methodologies, BA tools and architecture frameworks and providing leadership and implementation support for clients selecting tools and approaches.