The new Asia Pacific Federation of Project Management (apfpm) was successfully launched in Hong Kong on Saturday 24th April 2010. The launch was celebrated at the Annual Dinner of the Hong Kong Institute of Project Management. The night included Hong Kong luminaries from industry and senior government postings, Federation meeting delegates from Hong Kong, India, China, Nepal, Japan, United States, Indonesia, and Australia and 120 or so other guests.

The Federation’s vision is to drive Project Management to deliver real value in the Asia Pacific. With the high rate of business and social change occurring globally there is an increasing imperative to deliver better project outcomes in terms of capital effectiveness and business value. The end beneficiaries of such improvement would be individual career Project Managers, corporations, governments, and society broadly.

The forming of the Federation has been an initiative seeded by the Australian Institute of Project Management. The AIPM recognised the huge value in regional Associations working together to build a stronger and more robust profession across our region. The AIPM will act as Secretariat of the new Federation for the next four years to help ensure its foundational development and capacity building. The AIPM’s Trevor Alex (Victorian State President) will act as Federation Secretary, David Hudson (Queensland State President) will drive Standards Development, and Bill Young was elected Federation Chairman.

The Federation members will loosely comprise countries that are part of the Asia Pacific region. Although in order to build the organisation at a sustainable rate members will initially come from Australia and Asian countries. The whole catchment of countries within the region though represents around two thirds of the world's population and well over half of global trade. In spite of its diversity of languages, cultures, and landscapes, the nations in this cluster are inextricably linked by history and geography to working effectively together.

The value proposition for the apfpm is based on:

•  Power of collaboration: the benefit of working together brings a huge talent pool to influence and drive change improvements in project management practices and Association management.
•  Ability to identify and encourage the embracing of best practice Project Management across the Asia Pacific region. Only by openly sharing across partnering Associations can understanding and improved practices be developed.
•  Provides a singular regional voice that can represent and interact with governments and regional organisations such as the Asia Pacific Economic Community, Asian Development Bank, Association of South East Asian Nations, and others.
•  Presents the opportunity to consider an Asia Pacific Project Managers Baseline Competency Standard. Individual and fragmented local national associations would not be able to lift regional standards by themselves.
•  It will enable the running of an annual Asia Pacific Achievement Awards program, commencing in 2011. Providing recognition of professional excellence is highly regarded by both individual and corporate Association members.
•  Provides a platform for the development of communities of practice.
•  Enables reciprocity across regional Associations along with facilitating the transportability of competency Certifications.
•  Ability to benchmark across regional Associations to identify and drive best practice Association management.
•  The world is changing via globalisation and integration of markets, and the formation of many regional trading blocks. Organisations will find it increasingly difficult to act in isolation. Embracing an international approach through collaborative partnering will increase the stature of individual Associations with their governments and key stakeholders.
•  Provision of a portal to share Project Management Knowledge & Research.

What will contribute to the sustainability of the Federation is clear alignment of member objectives, support by respective organisations to commit to and make tangible contributions, a good corporate governance structure, and effective communications facilitated through regular meetings.

Upcoming face to face meetings of the Federation have been agreed for Darwin, Australia in October 2010 (AIPM’s National PM Conference), and New Deli, India in December 2010 (India’s Asia Pacific PM Conference). Organisation structure and Membership will be two key aspects dealt with at these respective meetings.

apfpm.org  is currently being developed that will contain details of the development of the Federation, its aspirations, information and links to all member Associations, an annual calendar of significant events, and an action plan for delivering on joint cooperative projects.

The new Federation is not expected to make a large change in the short term but is very upbeat on the likely benefits that will appear once disparate organisations build strong cooperative institutional bonds; and the value proposition to the collective organisations and individual Association members alike is realised.