PMBob 8.0: Flexible Thinking for a Complex World

You earned your PMP some time ago and attend events like this so you never have to take that test again. You are not sure where your PMBOK even is. The PMBOK has evolved significantly over the years and is now on the 8th edition. Has your thinking evolved with it? Early editions of the PMBOK focused just on process. An additional people focus was emphasized over time. PMBOK 8 completes the shift from prescriptive project management to flexible principles adaptable to any situation. This session will help you evolve your thinking and become more like the idealistic project managers - PMBob and PMBarb - envisioned by the latest PMBOK.

Eating the Elephant: Complexity in Megaprojects & Portfolio Management

Ever tried to steer a billion-dollar megaproject only to have plans upended overnight? In \\\\\\\"Eating the Elephant: Complexity in Megaprojects & Portfolio Management,\\\\\\\" a practitioner shares real-world tools such as Wardley Mapping, sense-making frameworks, OODA loops, and VUCA strategies for engaging with (not just managing) chaos in massive, high-stakes portfolios. Drawing from a live case study, this session offers project management professionals a practical toolkit for reducing bias, balancing competing stakeholders, and staying adaptive when best practices don’t cut it.

Optimizing your Customer Relationship

Nicholas explores why project managers should think beyond just delivering work—and focus on building real, personal relationships with their customers. Through stories and practical tips, Nicholas illustrates how being genuine, transparent, and proactive leads to smoother projects, stronger trust, and repeat business that no quality survey results can predict.

Every Project Manager should be a Project Leader, a "hidden value archaeologist." By listening closely, asking for referrals, and turning out-of-scope requests into funded work, leaders can organically grow accounts while delivering more value. The takeaway: move beyond simply being a status reporter, start being a trusted partner, and watch both your customer relationships and your value realization grow.

The Power of Games to Unleash Collaboration and Creativity at Work

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how we engage with associates and teams. There are now a lot of teams who work in a hybrid or virtual environment. Games are a unique tool that can be used to bring together teams, teach new skills, and help us adapt to the modern workplace. This is especially important for Millennials and Generation Z who have spent their entire lives playing games and want to see them in the workplace. The presentation will provide an overview of the history of games, explore team building games for hybrid or remote teams, and share best practices for using games to maintain quality in an altered work environment.

Project-Oriented Cost of Quality: Adapting the COQ Model for Strategic Project Success

This presentation introduces a critical evolution in organizational strategy by adapting the traditional Prevention-Appraisal-Failure (PAF) cost of quality model to the unique constraints of project-based management. While conventional quality cost structures thrive in the stable, continuous environments of mass production, they falter when applied to projects characterized by unique scopes, volatile environments, shifting internal priorities, and a binary tolerance for failure. By recognizing that a single project failure can devastate an enterprise, the talk highlights the urgent need for a predictive framework that translates operational quality issues directly into bottom-line corporate performance metrics.

To bridge this operational gap, a dynamic, time-phased Cost of Quality (COQ) model is introduced to map investments, monitoring, and waste as non-linear curves over a project’s lifecycle. By normalizing data for project duration and overall scale, executive leadership can systematically isolate environmental variances and classify historical project profiles to build proactive operational guardrails. Ultimately, the presentation outlines a practical implementation playbook enabling project-driven organizations to reallocate resources from late-stage inspection to upfront prevention, thereby compressing schedule variances and defending baseline profit margins.

Serving Something Bigger; Leadership that Elevates Every Experience

This keynote reframes leadership from managing operations to creating experiences that transform people. While several industries are measured by service, efficiency, and results, the presentation argues that the true competitive advantage begins long before a client walks into a meeting or an employee’s first day in the office, it starts with how leaders make their teams feel.

The presentation opens by recognizing the demanding reality of the modern day work force before shifting the audience's perspective: leadership isn't simply about running operations; it's about creating environments where people genuinely want to be. Using the concept of creating long-term, trusting relationships through meaningful actions, the keynote establishes that memorable client experiences are ultimately created through memorable employee experiences.

From there, the audience is introduced to the concept of emotional labor, the invisible energy leaders manage every day. Team members and guests arrive carrying their own stresses, and leaders become the emotional thermostat of the organization. This naturally leads into the idea of the Gift of Influence, illustrating that every leader shapes thousands of lives through small, consistent interactions rather than dramatic moments.

From Status Reports to Strategic Impact: How AI Elevates Modern Project Manager

Project managers today are expected to drive strategic outcomes while navigating growing complexity, changing stakeholder expectations, and constant organizational change.

This highly interactive session demonstrates how AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude can help project managers focus on business value delivery.

Through a series of live demonstrations and real-world project scenarios, attendees will learn practical AI workflows for generating project artifacts, analyzing risks, producing executive-ready insights, and improving project communications.

Key attendee takeaway: Participants leave with practical AI workflows and prompts that they can immediately apply to their projects, enabling them to spend less time preparing reports and more time delivering strategic value.

The Credibility Equation: How Everyday Choices Shape Trust, Influence, and Project Success

Credibility is one of the most valuable assets a professional can possess, yet few professionals build it intentionally. While technical skills and domain knowledge matter, lasting credibility is earned through something deeper: consistently demonstrating competence, reliability, integrity, and sound judgment. These qualities shape the trust others place in our recommendations, decisions, and leadership, influencing everything from stakeholder relationships to career opportunities.

In this session, we’ll explore the Credibility Equation, a practical framework built around competence, reliability, integrity, and judgment. We’ll examine how credibility is built through everyday professional choices, reinforced through consistent delivery, and tested when projects become difficult or uncertain. Through practical examples and guided reflection, you’ll learn how credibility is earned, how it can be unintentionally damaged, and how to strengthen it through deliberate professional practice.

Whether you are establishing yourself in a new role, seeking greater influence, or looking to become a trusted decision partner, this session will provide a practical framework for building the trust and confidence that underpin long-term professional success.

The Long Road Back

Transformation rarely follows a clean plan. Conditions change, assumptions fail, capacity shifts, and leaders must make decisions before they have complete information. In The Long Road Back, Dan Messina draws from his journey from electrician to executive leader, competitive cyclist, and traumatic brain injury survivor to explore what it means to lead when the plan, the system, and even the leader must change.

Designed for project professionals, this keynote connects personal recovery with the realities of leading complex organizational change. Dan challenges leaders to view plans as hypotheses, distinguish peak performance from sustainable capacity, and create environments where people can speak honestly about risk and uncertainty. Attendees will leave with a practical and deeply human approach to transformation: begin with the truth about the current condition, protect the purpose while adapting the path, and lead people through the difficult \"middle miles\" between an exciting beginning and a successful outcome.

The AI Adoption Traps - How PMs Turn AI Experiments into Trusted, Measurable Results

Al is showing up in projects whether organizations are ready for it or not.

Leaders want speed. Vendors promise productivity. Teams are already experimenting. And project managers are often standing right in the middle, trying to tum all that excitement into something useful, safe, and measurable. That’s where things can get messy.

Al is not just another software rollout Giving people access to a tool does not mean they know when to use it, when not to use it, how to check the output, or who is accountable when something goes wrong.

A project can look successful on paper and still create hidden rework, confused roles, weak decisions, frustrated employees, and results no one fully trusts.

In this practical one-hour presentation and workshop, we will look at the most common Al adoption traps and what project managers can do about them before those traps become expensive problems.

We will talk about choosing better starting points, building human review into the work, measuring the costs that do not show up on the productivity dashboard, and helping teams redesign the work instead of simply adding Al on top of an already overloaded process.

Participants will also work through a real-world Al use case using a simple set of questions they can take back to their own teams.

Need for SPEED: The F1 Portfolio Strategy
Every F1 car is fast and every driver is skilled. Winning and losing is not about building a faster car. It is about having the entire team working together at peak performance and unified in executing a deliberate winning strategy.
 
With Al, everyone can ship fast. When speed stops being scarce, it stops being a strategy; it becomes table stakes. Portfolio governance, the discipline of deciding what to build and when is becoming the single highest-leverage capability a C-Suite can own.

Details coming soon!

Escaping the Transparency Trap: The Adaptive PM’s Guide to Reporting Bad News

Every project manager has faced the moment: the project is slipping, and someone above you needs to know. We tell PMs that transparency builds trust, yet many of us have learned the hard way that raising bad news early can draw blame, micromanagement, or career damage, while those who stay quiet often skate by. This is the Transparency Trap, and it quietly teaches good project managers to report late, soften the truth, or say nothing at all.

Drawing on his ongoing research into escalation behavior in projects and a consulting career spent reporting project status to everyone from small business owners to federal agencies. Dr. Doug unpacks why honest reporting so often backfires, what organizational conditions set the trap, and how adaptive project managers escape it, escalating in ways that build credibility instead of spending it.

Target audience: project, program, and portfolio managers at all experience levels, along with PMO leaders and executives who want more honest reporting from their teams. No prior background required; anyone who has ever hesitated before hitting send on a status report will find themselves in this session.

Navigating the Gray: Embracing a Spectrum of Perspectives

In "Navigating the Gray: Embracing a Spectrum of Perspectives," Haley Grayless empowers the audience to break free from binary thinking and embrace the complexities of human experiences and emotions. By fostering an open-minded culture, attendees will learn how to navigate ambiguity and appreciate diverse viewpoints, which are essential for innovation and collaboration. This inspiring keynote encourages participants to recognize the value in the gray areas of life, leading to more effective decision-making and stronger relationships within teams.

The One Thing You Wish You Knew Sooner

In this session, we’ll explore the one thing that can transform the way we live and connect with others: understanding the impact we have on those around us. Whether in personal relationships, work environments, or casual encounters, the effect of our words, actions, and presence is far greater than we often realize. Through reflection, storytelling, and practical insights, this presentation will encourage you to recognize your unique influence and show you how embracing this awareness can lead to deeper connections, better decisions, and a more intentional life.

Details coming soon!

Closing the Vision-Execution Gap: Anatomy of a Moonshot

Every great vision dies on paper unless someone architects its execution. This session studies the vision-execution gap through contrasting stories of ambition realized and ambition abandoned, from the Apollo Program to Saudi Arabia’s NEOM megacity. Along the way, we’ll meet the operators in business, history, and pop culture who turn bold ideas into delivered results, often without credit. Attendees will leave with a clear framework for why execution, not vision alone, determines whether ambitious projects succeed, and why project managers sit at the center of that outcome.

Value Creation at the Intersection of Contracts, Project Lifecycle, and Financial Accountability

What if your contracts in your project lifecycle weren’t just administrative hurdles, but your biggest strategic advantage?

In this presentation, we flip the script on the traditional view of contract, financial and risk during the project management ecosystem. We are shifting from a slow, legacy mindset to a dynamic, value- driven approach—showing you how to transform the classical passive admin task into a powerful engine that accelerates agility, boosts quality, and drives real financial accountability across your entire organization.

Details coming soon!

The Adaptive PM’s Team Advantage: Using People Analytics to Build Innovative, High-Impact Teams

Projects increasingly operate in environments characterized by rapid change, cross-functional dependencies, competing priorities, and incomplete information. In this environment, project managers must do more than manage scope, schedule, cost, and risk. They must understand how people contribute, assemble teams intentionally, and adapt team roles as project needs evolve.

This interactive session introduces a practical people-analytics approach for improving project team formation and functioning. Using an Innovation Persona Questionnaire derived from IDEO’s Ten Faces of Innovation, participants will examine ten distinct contribution patterns organized into three broad families: Learning, Organizing, and Building. These patterns provide a shared language for understanding how individuals discover insights, test solutions, overcome barriers, coordinate stakeholders, communicate meaning, and create supportive team environments.

The session will demonstrate how persona insights can be combined with experience, education, certifications, project exposure, and validated skills data to support better project assignments, role clarity, development planning, and team composition. The assessment is positioned as one decision input not a fixed label or substitute for professional judgment, performance evidence, or demonstrated capability.

Participants will leave with a repeatable framework for asking better team-design questions, identifying contribution gaps, and aligning people with the changing needs of a project.