Less than 100 days to go – those are the words which elicit a mixture of feelings to the business community. It will certainly increase the footfall within the City and bring with it an increase in expenditure so many businesses are delighted. Others are conversely worried how the once in a lifetime event that is the Olympics will impact their business as staff try and get to work, and home again!

 A number of businesses that I work with have significantly reduced the level of work they are doing in London over the Olympic period, others have chosen to reassign teams to other offices around the country to minimise disruption on their business operation. It is not all doom and gloom though – there are great opportunities to be shared, experiences to be enjoyed and memories to be ultimately treasured. Whilst it has been viewed as a London event by many, the whole country will undoubtedly reflect on the Olympic event once the final ceremonies have been completed.

 What story does the history of other Games show? Research from BT on the 2010 Vancouver Games suggested sales for many businesses that prepared to take advantage of the opportunity increased by 10 – 25%; this continued on after the events. Interestingly only 27% of those surveyed attributed this to overseas visitors, this being significant since more of the increase was home grown and resulted in on-going benefit. Another important statistic through was that 30% of businesses felt they could have gained more benefit if they had prepared better.

 Preparation is key – prepare to be flexible, prepare to scale your business to meet demand, prepare to ensure your service levels do not suffer and prepare to create a beneficial legacy for your business.

 My blog will focus on the business impact in the immediate vicinity of the games, inside the games if I am able to arrange access (if you can help please do email since my efforts so far have not been fruitful), and also further afield. I will be looking at how businesses are preparing over the last 100 days and I am keen to capture the views of business owners and managers. As a business owner myself, I am aware of some of the challenges and opportunities that have been presented over the past few years – the coming few months will crystalize these for many.

 If you would be happy to share your thoughts and plans, please email them to me or I would be happy to come along to your business if it suits better. I will also be keeping a photographic journal which will support this blog and hope you will enjoy reading it before, during and after the Games. All submissions will be acknowledged and I hope to be able to capture a montage of the business perspectives of the Olympics.

This blog also appears on thesportsfeed.com

It has been a little while since writing my last blog since it has been a busy time here at PCMi. You may well notice a subtle change to the website with our core products being more accessible from the main menu and the reorganising of some of the support resources now found in the side menu bar,

The good news is that we have added new products to our portfolio and are now a Registered Education Provider (REP) with the Project Management Institute (PMI) so this will enable us to expand our portfolio of Project Management products. We are also leading the roll out of international project management capability developments with a number of organisations so these are exciting times.

We have also added to our Monitoring and Evaluation provision so again, if this is an area of interest please take a look and see how we can help.

Over the years I have noticed that the onset of Spring often breathes new life into the market and we wait to see how the next few quarters of 2012 develop. We want to continue to encourage the use of our groups feature which is provided without charge for registered users to build their own topic focused communities or study groups - if you have not tried it then give it a go.

As always, if you have any suggestions from improvement I am always happy to receive them. I do hope that the coming few months will prove to be successful for you.

We have been busy this week adding new site features and linking up to an excellent resource for aspiring PMP® candidates.

The new site features include our social networking platform which is designed to enable interaction and development through the use of group working. This will both support our existing development programmes and will open up many other areas for exploration as well, feel free to try it out!

We are also investing heavily in supplying support to indviduals seeking to become project managers or those who are working as project managers already but wish to increase their skills, capability and qualifications. Since we are able to advise and provide support across all of the main project managment qualifications, our approach builds upon the solid foundations we have developed over the past years.

The latest project management resource we have added to our portfolio is helping aspiring PMP® candidates and supporting those who already have the qualification to earn the required PDUs. More details on our offerings in these areas will be provided shortly but in the meantime, why not visit one of the following:

Aspiring PMP® candidates - http://pmp.groupsites.com

PMP® credential holders - PCMi groups

More and more of our clients are moving towards a blended learning or full e-learning approach. There are numerous articles on the worldwide web which focus on the benefits and disadvantages of such learning approach however the biggest challenge is to ensure that the experiential elements of development are not lost, something which can be more easily created in an instructor led environment.

PCMi has embraced the new technologies that are available for some time now and uses a range of approaches to meet client and learner needs but let's hear your thoughts - what type of learning do you prefer and why?

We are pleased to introduce one of our new features for 2012 - a blog for our website.

Keep up to date with the latest news and link to our social media portals on facebook and twitter.

We welcome ideas and feedback from you. Feel free to send us an email or tweet us.