UMT Dean, Chairman of Board Lecture to Chinese Audience

ARLINGTON, Virginia, August 24, 2001 - UMT's dean and chairman of the board recently gave an unprecedented lecture in Beijing about project management, an event that will soon be broadcast into millions of homes across China.

Academic Dean J. Davidson Frame and Chairman William G. Wells, Jr. gave a one-hour talk to a group of Chinese professionals as part of the Lecture Room program run by China Central Television (CCTV). The program will be run later this year on the national network.

"We were pleased and honored to be able to participate in this forum," said Dr. Frame. "We had a great time giving the talk and answering questions from audience members."

The talk was unprecedented because the Lecture Room program has been traditionally limited to Nobel Prize winners and other top scientists. This is the first time that CCTV had invited management experts to lecture in this forum.

Drs. Frame and Wells provided the Chinese audience with an informative dialogue about how Western corporations and governments have embraced project management as a way of meeting the challenges they face in a fast-changing world.

"Because China had just been awarded the 2008 Olympics, many of the questions concerned how Atlanta and Sydney Olympic committees had used project management," Dr. Frame said. "We were able to provide them with real case studies from our American and Australian students who were project managers for the Olympics at the time."

Students from UMT's project management program in Beijing were part of the audience. UMT, a global leader in project management education, is rapidly expanding its efforts to bring the discipline to China. Dr. Frame and other key faculty members have been lecturing about project management in China since 1985.

UMT has been conducting graduate and training programs in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou since 1998. UMT has 170 students in a project management focused MBA program in Shanghai, with another program starting in October.

The Lecture Room program was filmed during a visit to China that included Dr. Frame, Dr. Wells, and UMT President Yanping Chen. Their visit was widely covered by Chinese media; a second CCTV film crew is preparing a 20-minute special report on UMT’s efforts to bring project management to China.

To see the CCTV Lecture Room coverage on this lecture, visit: http://www.cctv.com/life/pjjt/index0925.html. In addition to CCTV, other major media outlets that have covered UMT activities include: Asia Pacific Time, Xinhua News Agency, People's Daily, Guangming Daily, Economic Daily, China Youth Daily, Industrial and Economic Times, Shanghai Daily, Beijing Morning Post, Beijing Youth Post, Shenzhen Economic Daily, and the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily.