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

- Anne White:

Leading Through the Storm: Keeping Teams Engaged Amidst Crisis or Chaos

In times of adversity, leadership plays a crucial role in guiding teams through uncertainty. This session will equip you with practical strategies to keep your team focused, engaged, and resilient. You’ll learn how to prepare for challenges, lead with clarity and empathy during crises, and transform obstacles into growth opportunities. Discover how to foster a culture of connection that empowers your team to not just weather the storm, but emerge stronger and more unified, ensuring long-term success and thriving in the face of adversity.

- 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.

- Marcus Udokang: Using AI on Real Projects

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:

Difference between a Mentor, a Sponsor, 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

Session 4

- Delvin Fletcher/Susan Moore: The PM and BA relationship

-  Sinikka: Emotional Intelligence (EI) is what AI can’t do

-  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