Event Schedule

Registration & Breakfast

Opening Ceremony & Keynote

Hans Eckman-Harry Potter & Presentation of Secrets: 7 Leadership Lessons

Do the circumstances make the leader, or do great leaders make the circumstances? In J.K. Rowling’s amazing book series, Harry Potter finds himself rejoining the wizarding world only to discover he has a legend to live up to. Each year, Harry and his friends faced a new set of personal and environmental challenges.

Join us to discover seven secrets of leadership, teams, and personal growth from the book series that changed the world. We will discuss pivotal strategies and approaches that Harry used to overcome He Who Must Not Be Named. You will learn how to apply these lessons to your professional journey and personal growth.

●       Learn why diverse teams with a common thread are your best problem solvers

●       Learn how to play to your strengths and overcome weaknesses

●       Learn the importance of standing up for the right thing and why it can be so difficult

Sessions 1

- Lori Crever: 

Basics of Organizational Change: What Every Project Professional Should Know (OCM)

Join us for a strategic 60-minute breakout session led by author and career strategist Lori Crever. Drawing on her years designing and managing new initiatives and high-visibility integration through two institutional mergers (Norwest & Wells Fargo and Wells Fargo & Wachovia), Lori will share wisdom and tactics on how to lead through organizational change.

- Michael Roberts:

How AI and the Digital Thread Drive Real-Time Visibility and Control

Most PMOs are still operating with fragmented data, manual reporting, and limited visibility across the lifecycle of work.  This makes it difficult to proactively manage risk, align to business goals, and deliver predictable outcomes.  This session explores how a connected digital thread, powered by structured data and AI, enables real-time visibility and control across projects and portfolios.  You’ll see how tools like Atlassian Rovo uncover hidden relationships between strategic objectives, user stories, and test outcomes, and how organizations can move beyond isolated AI experiments to scalable, production-ready solutions.  We’ll also share how SPK and Associates helps PMOs and engineering teams align processes, tools, and data to successfully adopt AI and drive measurable business results.

Attendees will learn:

   - How structured data and traceability enable real-time visibility across projects, programs, and portfolios
   - What a digital thread looks like in practice and how it improves alignment between strategy and execution
   - How AI can surface risks, gaps, and hidden relationships across work items and outcomes
   - Why many AI initiatives fail after the POC phase and how to successfully scale them

- Jeff Bubolz/ Chad Beier: 

High Frequency Leadership: How real change happens

Most leadership teams want meaningful change—but many unintentionally slow it down.
High-Frequency Leadership is about breaking that cycle by increasing the cadence of how leaders listen, align, decide, and act. Instead of operating on long, infrequent cycles filled with overloaded calendars and reactive fire drills, high-frequency leaders intentionally create slack for reflection, coaching, prioritization, and improvement. They stop being victims of their own schedules and start designing them.
In this talk, we’ll explore how leadership teams can apply Scrum-like rhythms to their own work: ordering change by impact, planning change collaboratively, creating shared visibility, reviewing progress often, and reflecting as a team to get better. We’ll cover practical habits such as high-value 1:1s, targeted listening, crafting a clear and persistent vision, and using empirical signals (not gut feel) to steer transformation.
You’ll hear real stories from a leadership team that completely reinvented how they operated—moving from slow, fragmented decision-making to a high-frequency, high-alignment, high-trust engine of change. Attendees will walk away with a leadership operating system they can immediately apply to accelerate improvement, build healthier organizations, and make real change actually happen.

- MJ Reiners: 

The Hidden Powers of Success: Engineering Energy

Every project lives in two worlds: the visible world of plans, milestones, budgets, and teams — and the invisible world of energy, intention, and human dynamics. Most leaders operate only in the first. The most effective leaders quietly master both.

The Hidden Powers of Success: Engineering Energy reveals the unseen architecture called thoughtforms that determines whether a project flows or fights, accelerates or stalls. Participants will learn how to work with energy as intentionally as they work with people, scope or schedule.

This session's core reveals a simple truth: Thoughtforms are real. They behave like hidden computer programs that determine outcomes long before execution begins. High-performing leaders know how to create powerful project thoughtforms, strengthen team coherence, and remove energetic resistance.

Sessions 2

- Sinikka Waugh:

Seriously, Don’t Say That!! Five Inadvertently Inflammatory Things We Say in Times of Change

We don't mean to make a mess. We're trying to make things better. But change is messy, and sometimes the people we're trying to bring along don't respond the way we expected. Often, it's because we've unintentionally said something that creates more resistance, frustration, or confusion than we intended.

Join change management expert Sinikka Waugh for an engaging and thought-provoking look at five common phrases that can derail improvement efforts and what to say instead. Drawing from hard-earned lessons on real-world projects, Sinikka shares practical examples that will resonate with PMs, BAs, PMO leaders and anyone involved in any effort that’s creating change.

You'll leave with actionable tools and communication strategies you can use immediately to reduce friction, build trust, and make change just a little less painful for everyone involved, making your workday, and theirs, even better.

Learning objectives: 

- Hear and recognize the false assumptions behind common phrases
- Encounter and draw a simple and reusable model that helps move people forward with minimal drama, active engagement, and maximum participation
- Commit to one takeaway you’ll apply, starting right now

- Rachel Yarger: 

Change Overload: Make It Stick Anyway (OCM)

Most organizations don’t implement one change at a time; they implement dozens. This session explores how change management frameworks apply across a portfolio, highlighting the risks of cumulative change, misaligned messaging, and insufficient reinforcement. Attendees will leave with practical ways to identify change collisions, support executive alignment, and improve adoption across simultaneous initiatives. 

- Elias Mokole:

The Leadership Dance: The Power of Your Voice in Crucial Conversations

Clear ideas do not always lead to clear communication, especially when conversations are high-stakes, time-sensitive, or difficult to revise once they begin. This session explores practical communication skills that help professionals deliver important messages with greater clarity and steadiness under pressure.
Participants will work with four observable elements of delivery: intention, breath use, tone, and connection. Through guided exercises and structured observation, attendees learn how to communicate one clear idea, reduce overload, and make real-time adjustments more effectively.
Designed for leaders, project professionals, facilitators, and anyone responsible for important conversations, this session offers repeatable tools that can be applied immediately in meetings, stakeholder discussions, presentations, and decision-making environments.

- Bola Adesope

Project Creativity in the Age of AI

AI can generate, summarise, and analyse faster than any team in history, so what's left for the humans? Quite a lot, and it's the most valuable part.

As AI absorbs routine cognitive work, a project professional's real advantage shifts to creativity, judgement, and the disciplined thinking that machines still can't replicate.

This interactive session reframes AI not as a replacement for human ingenuity, but as an amplifier of it, if you know how to think well alongside it.

Through hands-on activities and light gamification, participants will practise structured creative and critical-thinking techniques and mindset they can bring straight to their projects. We'll explore how a simple structured problem-solving process keeps teams from jumping to solutions, how the Six Thinking Hats unlocks perspectives a team would otherwise miss, and how tools like the 5 Whys and Fishbone diagram get to the real root of a problem rather than its symptoms.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

- Distinguish the thinking work best left to humans from the work best delegated to AI.

- Apply a structured problem-solving process to move from symptom to root cause before reaching for a solution.

- Use the Six Thinking Hats to deliberately generate and pressure-test ideas from multiple perspectives.

- Apply the 5 Whys and Fishbone diagram to diagnose problems more rigorously.

- Combine human creativity and critical thinking with AI tools to strengthen project outcomes.

Lunch and Sponsors

Session 3

- Craig Thielen:

The Future of Work: Unified Ways of Working in the AI Era

In this session, we will examine why traditional delivery models, operating silos, and fixed ways of planning and execution are no longer enough in a world shaped by AI, accelerating change, and rising expectations for speed, adaptability, and value realization. For project leaders, program leaders, and IT executives, the challenge is no longer choosing between Agile, Waterfall, product, or operational models in isolation, but creating a unified way of working that brings strategy, governance, delivery, change enablement, data, and human decision-making into a more connected system. This session will explore what is changing, what leading organizations are beginning to do differently, and why success in the future will depend on integrating people, processes, technology, and leadership behaviors into a coherent operating approach. Attendees will leave with a practical perspective on the emerging Unified Ways of Working model, the capabilities required to thrive in the AI era, and the leadership shifts needed to move from fragmented execution to aligned, adaptive, enterprise-wide delivery.

- Lori Crever:

The Difference Between a Sponsor, a Mentor, and a Coach

Join us for an illuminating 60-minute breakout session led by author and career mentorship expert Lori Crever. Drawing on her years running a highly successful mentor program for Wells Fargo’s international division, along with studying and experiencing career quantum leaps resulting from sponsorship, Lori will share practical strategies on how to work with these key career resources.

- V. Lee Henson: 

Leading Organizational Transformation: Four Phases That Transcend Project Management (OCM)

Join us as we explore why lasting transformation requires more than project plans, governance structures, and delivery frameworks. In this engaging and practical session, participants will learn a proven four-phase approach for leading meaningful organizational change that addresses Ideation, Discovery, Delivery, and Release. Attendees will discover how successful transformations move beyond managing tasks and timelines to creating alignment, building commitment, overcoming resistance, and sustaining momentum long after implementation begins. Through real-world examples, interactive discussions, and actionable tools, leaders will gain practical techniques for navigating complexity, accelerating adoption, and driving organizational outcomes that endure. This session is ideal for executives, transformation leaders, project and program managers, Agile practitioners, and anyone responsible for leading change in today's rapidly evolving business environment.

- Lisa Talbot: 

Beyond Busywork: How AI Co-Pilots Transform Project Delivery Without Replacing the Human Brain

You've probably used AI to write a better email. This session starts where that ends. Lisa Talbot, PMP, TPM, shares how she uses AI to build living communication dashboards, generate consistent status reports and decks with Claude Skills, and surface program risk early with Atlassian's Rovo inside Jira and Confluence — turning hours of manual chasing and reformatting into minutes. The bigger point: every one of these use cases hands you back time for the part of PMO leadership AI can't do — coaching your people and managing the human side of the program. Includes a takeaway prompt handout and sample dashboard.

Session 4

- Delvin Fletcher/Susan Moore:

The Outcome-Driven Mindset: A New Lens for PM-BA Collaboration

The PM and BA relationship works best when both roles are working in the same direction — but that requires more than good communication. It requires a shared mindset.

Both the BABOK and PMBOK are clear: value comes from outcomes, not outputs. But "value" can feel abstract and hard to act on. And when PMs and BAs are focused on their respective deliverables, they can miss the bigger picture. The challenge is in making that shift. How do you move from a deliverable and role-focused mindset to one that prioritizes outcomes? Sometimes you need to see it in action before you can perform it.

In this interactive session, we'll define what we mean by an outcome-driven mindset and then we'll put it to the test. Through a fun movie quiz format, you'll discover how this mindset changes the ways you can define success that go beyond the traditional ways that BAs and PMs work together.

Walk away with a new lens for your PM-BA relationships — one that puts outcomes at the center of every conversation.

- Sinikka Waugh:

EI is What AI Can't Do

In a space being dominated by conversations about AI, we still have to work with humans. “Working with people is the easiest thing in the world” - said no one ever! Collaborating isn’t always easy, and stellar working relationships don’t happen overnight, even for experienced professionals. This workshop incorporates techniques used by seasoned professionals to get the most out of working relationships with team members, sponsors, and even the trickiest of stakeholders.

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is what AI can’t do. AI evokes every possible emotion among our stakeholders: it’s exciting, disruptive, fascinating, terrifying, thrilling, and everything in between! They want it yesterday, now, and never, and all possible variables. Those of us tasked with leading projects, portfolios, and PMOs are in a uniquely powerful position to ensure that we leverage effective relationship management to influence our stakeholders to us AI in the best way possible for the best possible outcome for our organizations. So let’s take a look at some of the emotional intelligence and advanced collaboration techniques we can bring to the table.

In this quick hit session, you will leverage strategies like positional power, personal power and languages of appreciation to bring your emotional intelligence to the conversation. We’ll also cover easy to apply tactics and tools like two little words that can diffuse even the stickiest of situations.

-  Barb Monson:

How To Delegate So It Gets DONE!  

Most leaders don’t struggle with assigning work. They struggle with watching it come back incomplete, misaligned, or not done at all, causing frustration, rework, and the temptation to just do it themselves.
In this session participants learn why delegation breaks down and how to replace vague
handoffs with clear ownership, aligned expectations, and accountability that actually works. Attendees will explore the critical decisions leaders must make before delegating, including whether they are assigning a task or transferring responsibility, who the lowest qualified person is to handle the work, and whether the goal is efficiency, development, or both.
This session equips leaders with a repeatable delegation framework that reduces follow-up, improves results, and helps them shift from being the bottleneck to building a capable, accountable team.
Learning objectives:
1. Identify what must be decided before delegating
2. Apply key “Dos and Don’ts” when assigning work
3. Conduct effective corrective conversations

-  Jeff Bubolz/ Chad Beier: 

Alignment: The Only Change Management That Matters (OCM)

Organizations often approach change as something to manage—with plans, communications, and carefully structured rollouts. Yet the success or failure of change rarely comes down to process. It comes down to alignment.
When leaders create clarity around strategy, priorities, and direction, people naturally make decisions that move change forward. When alignment is weak or inconsistent, even the best change management efforts struggle to produce real results.
In this talk, we’ll explore the relationship between alignment, leadership, and execution of change, and why meaningful change is less about managing initiatives and more about creating shared understanding and momentum. You’ll leave with a different perspective on what makes change actually happen—and what leaders can do to accelerate it.

Endnote and Closing

V. Lee Henson-Heroics vs. Traditions: How Career Advancement Really Happens

Career advancement is often presented as a predictable path: follow the rules, gain experience, and success will come. In reality, the moments that define careers rarely follow tradition, they require courage, visibility, and leadership when it matters most.

Using a superhero metaphor as an underpinning, this session explores a powerful truth: most heroes are not born extraordinary, they become extraordinary because something happens to them. A challenge, a failure, or a responsibility forces them to step forward. Superman is the exception. He is born a hero who puts on a disguise to blend in. Many professionals unknowingly do the same, hiding strengths to fit outdated expectations.

This leadership-focused session examines the tension between tradition and heroics in career growth. Participants will learn how advancement really happens, how to recognize pivotal leadership moments, and how to step into impact without waiting for a title, crisis, or permission.

Happy Hour & Networking