Project Management Meet Ups: sharing experience at CERN
By Isabel Bejar Alonso
Over the past two years, the Project Management Meet Ups (PMMUs) have grown into a regular forum for CERN colleagues to share practical experience, tools and lessons learned from managing projects across the Organization.
The meetings have deliberately combined different formats: technical presentations, informal project stories, poster sessions, “speed dating” and hands-on exchanges around project-management tools and templates. Topics have ranged from project planning, monitoring and risk management to requirements, quality, scheduling, stakeholder management and leadership.
A particular focus has been placed on making experience reusable. One PMMU brought together CERN project-management templates covering the complete project lifecycle, from project initiation and work breakdown structures to risk management, change requests, lessons learned and project close-out.
Other sessions have showcased real projects and the challenges faced by their teams, including the ISOLDE Beam Dumps Replacement and Sustainability project, detector projects, IT projects and projects involving external partners.
The PMMUs have also become a place to explore new approaches, including digital tools, process mapping and the development of more streamlined project-management practices within CERN.
More than a series of meetings, the PMMUs are helping build a CERN-wide project-management community: connecting people, sharing practical knowledge and turning individual experience into collective capability.
The next session will take place on 6th of October 2026, between 16h30 and 17h30 in the Kjell Johnsen auditorium (30/7-018).
Its topic: ” Showcase your Project ! Present. Discuss. Repeat.”
This session will give the opportunity to anyone to present the project they are working on and to share their experience with the audience in an unformal and relaxed setting.
No specific theme, no imposed topic. Just a time limit of 15 minutes (presentation + discussion).
This is also a call for speakers !
Should you wish to talk about your project, let us know at pmmu@cern.ch
It could be about methodologies, tools, processes, planning, challenges, failures, successes… you name it.
First come, first served.
The session after, on the 3rd of November, will be about “The Human Capital Management Project”