Program

 

 


 

 Speaker & Session Lineup

 (Subject to Change)

 

 

8:00am

Registration – Main Lobby

Breakfast – Main Ballroom

9:00am

Keynote – Dr. Janice Thomas:  Where are we going and how will we get there? – Main Ballroom

10:10am

Mingle

 

Room 1

Room 2

Room 3

Room 4 (upstairs)

10:20am

Career Management in Knowledge Economy

 

Rob Straby

Team Synergy – Strengths, Gaps and Strategies, Kolbe Wisdom™

Gerry Tetrault

Enterprise project management systems – Friend or Foe?

Wendy Hague

Sustainability’s Increasing Role in Strategy and Project Selection

Mike Morrice

11:20am

Mingle

11:30am

Adapting Agile Concepts in a Fixed-Scope, Fixed-Time Project

Fred Verboom

Changing the Game – Communication

 

Dhanu Kothari

Using PMCDF to Become a Better Project Manager

 

George Jucan

PPM Tools: Where we have come from, where we are today and what’s next

Craig McQueen

12:30pm

Lunch – Main Ballroom

 1:15pm

Keynote – Carl Sergeant:  The Evolution of the Project Manager – Main Ballroom

2:15pm

Mingle

 

Room 1

Room 2

Room 3

Room 4 (upstairs)

2:25pm

Be agile and extend the longevity of your career path!

Mike Edwards

Project Rescues with Covey, ITIL, and PMI methodologies

Jaqueline Spence & Debbie Davy

The PMO of the Future

 

Guy Lazure & Tony Pimenoff

Preparing for the New Frontier of Project Management

Errol A. Gibbs

3:25pm

Mingle

3:35pm

Keynote – Dr. Hans Thamhain:  The Future of Team Leadership in Complex Project Environments – Main Ballroom

4:35pm

Networking Wine & Cheese – Main Ballroom

5:30pm

Close

 

Career Management in Knowledge Economy

 

Rob Straby

 

 

 

Rob Straby has followed his passion for the innovation and development of state-of-the-art professional development coaching, facilitation and training systems since 1986.  He has delivered these services to individuals, teams and departments in corporations, human services organizations, educational institutions and government services.

 

Career Management in a Knowledge Economy:

The knowledge economy demands a proactive approach to successful career management. In order for you to be consistently happy and effective in your work, you need to be able to strategically manage your career. Regardless of the work challenges you face, this seminar will help you to take the steps you need to build your career (e.g. how to change jobs, get promotions, ask for a raise, etc). Through a high participation process, you will learn:

·         What really matters about career building today

·         Where you need to focus your energies to be effective

·         How to create a career building strategy 

·         What action steps you can take now

 

Team Synergy – Strength, Gaps and Strategies

 

Gerry Tetrault

 

Gerry is a seasoned veteran with over 30 years experience in project and program management. A very positive person, Gerry has strong management, leadership and people skills making him an excellent motivator. His trademark is understanding people and placing them in situations where they can succeed in achieving personal, project and corporate goals.

 

Team Synergy – Strengths, Gaps and Strategies

In supporting the theme “Projecting the Future”, this presentation will show how you can predict the performance of your team’s behaviour using a body of knowledge called Kolbe Wisdom™. 

This topic directly ties to the project management fundamental of team work, team productivity and proactively monitoring and controlling team performance. Understanding your team’s distribution of natural strengths based on Kolbe A™ Index allows you to anticipate team challenges, gaps and issues and devise strategies to manage them proactively.

 

The presentation will describe:

·         What is Kolbe and conation 

·         How to leverage the diverse natural strengths of team members

·         What is Team Synergy™

·         Examples of strategies to employ when your team has less than ideal Team Synergy™

·         What strengths are needed during different phases of the project life cycle

 

Enterprise Project Management Systems – Friend or Foe

 

Wendy Hague

 

Wendy has created and managed a Project Management Office, led teams of project managers, and worked with executives to build project management capabilities within their organizations.  A proven project manager, Wendy has managed large strategic projects.  Wendy is currently self-employed providing project management and training expertise on a contract basis. 

 

Enterprise project management systems – Friend or Foe?

In organizations of any size, there comes a time when the Project Management stakeholders (PMs, sponsors or project team members) recognize that the complexity of managing projects in a multi-project world is significant.  They begin to wonder if automated tools could help address this complexity.  The need to look at different Enterprise Project Management systems is further promoted by eager sales representatives who advise that their system can be successfully deployed in mere weeks and will vastly improve the organization’s project management processes.   So what does a smart PMO leader do?  He/she begins to look at Enterprise Project Management systems.   In this presentation, Wendy will describe the role an Enterprise Project Management system can play in an organization, what options exist to implement such a system and how to go about it.  She will also advise of the pitfalls and key success factors and share her experiences working with different systems.

 

Sustainability’s Increasing Role in Strategy and Project Selection

 

Mike Morrice

 

Mike Morrice, Co-Founder & Executive Director, Sustainable Waterloo.  Mike has been the Executive Director of Sustainable Waterloo since its inception in July 2008. Sustainable Waterloo is a not-for-profit organization that guides corporations in Waterloo Region towards a more environmentally sustainable future by facilitating collaboration between industry, local government, academia, and NGOs. The current work of Sustainable Waterloo is centered on the Regional Carbon Initiative, which supports voluntary target-setting and reductions of carbon emissions in organizations across Waterloo Region.  Mike is a graduate of Wilfrid Laurier University, where he concurrently completed a BBA and a BSc in Computing and Computer Electronics. Recently, Mike was selected by The Waterloo Region Record as one of Waterloo Region's Top 40 under 40.

 

Sustainability’s Increasing Role in Strategy and Project Selection

Mike will discuss the role of voluntary programs in reducing GHGs, the work that Sustainable Waterloo is doing in our community, how sustainability is taking an increasing role in strategy and project selection, and why organizations are acting now to prepare for the low-carbon economy.

 

Adapting Agile Concepts in a Fixed-Scope, Fixed-Time Project

 

Fred Verboom

 

Strategic-focused IT Project Manager, with business acumen in Financial Services, Insurance and CRM, attributes his success to establishing strong business and technology partnerships to explore organization strategies and directions, and deliver relevant business solutions. Fred volunteers at Hospice Wellington, providing grief / bereavement support, and co-facilitating the volunteer training program.

 

Adapting Agile Concepts in a Fixed-Scope, Fixed-Time Project

My project is to replace an existing legacy policy administration application, using concepts from Agile. As this is an application replacement initiative, the scope is fixed (current functionality plus a few specific additional features) and the time-to-market is important (current application is written in VB 6.0, on a Windows platform, is problematic to maintain, and inhibits extensibility to new functionality, and much business growth). My proposed agenda is to discuss and share:

 

·         The Economical Insurance Group (brief description of the organization)

·         The Project - StarFleet

·         Approach

·         Project team

·         Project / Iteration Planning / Burndown

·         Retrospectives

·         Successes       

·         Challenges

 

Projecting the Future & Changing the Game …

 

It Won’t Happen if You Can’t Communicate!

 

Dhanu Kothari

 

Dhanu Kothari is a consultant and a professional speaker with 30 years of Project Management experience with HP, DEC, Honeywell, Nortel, Scotia bank, Univac and the Norwegian Computing Center. He has presented at NASA, Project World, PMI SIGS/Chapters, DPI and IT symposiums. He is a past President of the PMI-SOC and the Rotary Newmarket, and a “PM Ambassador” for PMForum. Dhanu has authored two books on Project Management:“Rainbows & Ratholes: Best Practices for Managing Successful Projects” and “From Ratholes to Rainbows: Managing Project Recovery”.

 

Projecting the Future & Changing the Game …

It Won’t Happen If You Can’t Communicate!

Failure to communicate and connect the dots is the number one reason for troubled projects. How does a Project Manager actually get his/her work done to accomplish project objectives? The presentation focuses on understanding and building the necessary communication skills to influence project outcomes. Share your experiences and learn about communication challenges, goals, modes, strategies, tools and techniques, and the art of leveraging them to drive your project. Communication is an integral part of networking and building relationships. Recognize the warning signs of failed or ineffective communication and adopt the Best Practices that are consistently used by outstanding Project Managers. After all, it won’t happen if you can’t communicate!

 

Using PMCDF to Become a Better Project Manager

 

George Jucan

 

George Jucan is a successful IT project management consultant, speaker at public events, trainer and author of high-impact project management articles, with almost 20 years of technical and management experience in complex environments, both in public and private sector.  George Jucan is currently a member of the Core Team for the upcoming PMBOK® Guide 5th Edition. His previous leadership activities in PMI Standards Committees include PMBOK® Guide 4th Edition, PMCDF - 2nd Edition and Government Extension to the PMBOK® Guide - 3rd Edition. 

Moreover, George is currently the Vice-Chair of PMI Information Systems SIG, as well as a Board member of PMI Southern Ontario Chapter. He is also Vice-Chair of the Canadian Advisory Committee for the ISO 21500 - project management standard.

 

Using PMCDF to Become a Better Project Manager

Project Management Institute (PMI) uses three dimensions to define a competent project manger: knowledge, performance and personal competencies. While a project manager's knowledge can be demonstrated by obtaining the PMP certification (or equivalent), assessing the performance and personal competencies is much more difficult.  This session will demonstrate how PMI's Project Manager Competency Development Framework - Second Edition can be used by any Project Manager to improve own performance and personal competencies, and use the increased capabilities within organizational context to increase the likelihood for project success.

 

PPM Tools: Where We Have Come From, Where We Are Today And What’s Next

 

Craig McQueen, Paul Estabrooks

 

 

Craig McQueen leads the Business Intelligence Practice at Agora Consulting Partners Inc. Through his consulting career he has contributed to six books and presented at international conferences. He has worked with Enterprise customers including TD Bank, RBC, Rogers Communications and Bell Canada. He is a graduate of Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo.

  

PPM Tools: Where we have come from, where we are today and what’s next

You have a unique opportunity to provide significant value to your organization with the newest set of Project Portfolio Management (PPM) tools. PPM tools now consolidate many former standalone applications. They enable collaboration from all members of a project team and follow a project from idea through to closure. This presentation will provide a brief history of project tools, explain why we are at a pivotal point in time today and suggest future directions of PPM tools. The concepts of a unified platform will be illustrated through Microsoft Project Server 2010. Introducing a new platform into an organization requires a business case to understand the benefits. This presentation will also cover a structured approach to prepare a business case to introduce a new PPM platform into your organization.

 

Be Agile and Extend the Longevity of Your Career Path!

 

Mike Edwards

 

Mike is the Senior Program Manager at Home Hardware, and is continually seeking ways to improve project results.   Mike’s current journey is incorporating Agile and Lean with how project teams do their work.  Mike spends his time coaching the entire project team and the reward is in their success.

 

Be agile and extend the longevity of your career path!

PMI advocates seem to have a deep distrust towards agile practices as it is often viewed as being an uncontrollable way of working. Agile practitioners seem to believe the PMI framework is too rigid, adding unnecessary overhead to a project and should be avoided at all costs. PMI & Agile experts are both attempting to reach the same goal of delivering high strategic value and it's time to stop discounting each other.  During this interactive session we will explore these two worlds demonstrating how the agile and PMI practices enable the strategic value we all work hard to deliver. We will explore how the PMI framework serves to increase the success of an agile project if the PMI framework is approached in an agile manner itself. I will use three project experiences as the backbone of this presentation to demonstrate how we can deliver high value to our customers.

 

 

What They Don’t Teach You in Project Management School: 

 

How to turn the bad and the ugly into the good


Jacqueline Spence, Debbie Davy

 

Jacqueline Spence is a Project and Program Manager with more than 15 years experience in project management and 20 years experience in information technology.  She has led significant projects for the finance, energy distribution, media, trust and brokerage, transportation, and tourism at clients like Hydro One, CIBC Mellon, and Torstar, Canadian Pacific, Bank of Montreal, SHL Systemhouse, Onerail, and Telus Mobility. Her specialty is leadership of projects and programs, providing consulting for PMOs, implementation of infrastructure programs, comprehensive project documentation, and application development projects for Fortune 500 companies in Canada and the United Kingdom.

 

Debbie Davy is a project management professional with more than 25 years of experience in telecommunications, media, IT, medical informatics, and scientific research projects in the private, broader public, and public sectors.  Debbie’s private sector clients include Torstar, Rogers, Research in Motion, Nortel, CIBC, Capgemini, Accenture, Giesecke & Devrient, and B Sharp.  Debbie’s public and broader public sector clients include Hydro One, Hydro One Networks, Elections Ontario, Ministry of Transportation, Ontario Greenhouse and Vegetable Growers Association, and the former Smart Systems for Health Agency. Debbie is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a PhD student in Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University.  Her research interests focus on the effective communication of project management methodologies.

 

What they don’t teach you in project management school: how to turn the bad and the ugly into the good

How can Project Managers who inherit legacy projects with missed milestones, slipped deadlines, or unfocused resources make their projects successful? Join us for an informative and useful presentation that will explore this topic through real world examples and case histories. Through a mash up of Covey, ITIL, and PMI methodologies, we’ll explore how to make unsalvageable and abandoned projects successful. We’ll share our experiences in engaging stakeholders, getting buy-in from management, and getting things done from projects in the financial, IT, media, telecommunications, and medical informatics fields.   And we’ll have fun along the way.

 

The PMO of the Future

 

Guy Lazure, Tony Pimenoff

 

Guy is the founding principal of Projectit Performance Solutions Inc., a professional services firm dedicated to improving the delivery of strategic initiatives within organizations.  Guy holds a PMP, a CHRP designation, and is among the first 100 persons, worldwide, to receive the “PMI Certified OPM3 Professional” certifications.

 

Tony Pimenoff has over 25 years’ experience in the IS/IT industry spanning both the academic and business sectors.  A self-proclaimed “Renaissance Information Technology Professional, and Visionary Leader”, Tony has been a Manager and Director of IT Services in the manufacturing and educational sectors, President of his own consulting company for twelve years, Senior Technical Counsellor for the world’s largest nickel producing mining company, and a professor/lecturer at a community college in the early days of his career.  In his current role as Project Office Manager in the IT Project Management Office for Home Hardware Stores Ltd., Tony has been instrumental in introducing, developing, and institutionalising novel approaches to enhancing project management maturity.  He has given talks and presentations on OPM3 (“Investigation Into OPM3”, “OPM3 - Struggles and Strategies for Success”) both through the local PMI-CTT Chapter and independently, and is actively engaged in finding opportunities to enhance project management maturity through the application of OPM3 Best Practices and Capabilities in his day-to-day work.  Tony is a PMI Certified OPM3 Assessor and Consultant – one of three certified consultants in Ontario, eight in Canada, and ninety-six in the World!"

 

The PMO of the Future

 

The Problem: How can PMOs keep adding value to their organization and become the PMO of the Future?

 

In this presentation, you will learn how a PMO can move from being a cost center to a profit center and become the PMO of the future.  Broken into three parts, this presentation will first quickly review the current PMO and project maturity models. Then using this knowledge, we explore how the move from the current cost center approach, to a profit center approach, is the way to go for the organization of the future. From there the presenters will review a few proposed approaches on how to do this. We will define how it can quantify the gains and how to get credit for them. This will include a pragmatic way to do this in a deliberate planned approach, using a quantifiable data.

 

Preparing for the New Frontier of Project Management

 

Errol A. Gibbs

 

Errol Gibbs is recognized as an expert in all aspects of Project Management (PM); Process Designs; Planning and Scheduling; and Project Controls. He is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) who has held such positions as: Planning and Scheduling Engineer/Officer; Project Management Analyst; Scientific Technologist; Sr. Process Designer; and Sr. Project Management and Business Consultant.

 

Preparing for the New Frontier of Project Management

This presentation examines the need to enhance the value to project management - schedule modeling within corporations. The presentation sets at the foundation of Project Management (PM), a Dynamic Integrated Scheduling Model as the critical link to work execution, work performance, and work management. It is the foundation upon which to model Project/Product Life Cycle activities, from Program/Project Vision to throughput, and final delivery. These are some of the challenges the presenter faced during his assignment at General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, and other major corporations in the United States.  The presenter contends that in order to realize the full benefits of Project Management - Schedule Integration, and web-enabling technology; project management professionals must develop greater expertise in this critical area of project management. The model facilitates enterprise reporting, which is essential to a holistic understanding of project status; project performance measurements; and project controls.

 

 

Rob Straby has followed his passion for the innovation and development of state-of-the-art professional development coaching, facilitation and training systems since 1986.  He has delivered these services to individuals, teams and departments in corporations, human services organizations, educational institutions and government services.

 

Career Management in a Knowledge Economy:

The knowledge economy demands a proactive approach to successful career management. In order for you to be consistently happy and effective in your work, you need to be able to strategically manage your career. Regardless of the work challenges you face, this seminar will help you to take the steps you need to build your career (e.g. how to change jobs, get promotions, ask for a raise, etc). Through a high participation process, you will learn:

·         What really matters about career building today

·         Where you need to focus your energies to be effective

·         How to create a career building strategy 

·         What action steps you can take now

 

Recent Newsletter...

Issue 47, Summer 2010

Upcoming Events...

PMConnect Sept 17, 2010
September 17, 2010 7:45 am
Sept 22, 2010 Facilitation Skills Practicuum - Part 2
September 22, 2010 6:30 pm
PMConnect Oct 15, 2010
October 15, 2010 7:45 am
2010 Symposium
October 26, 2010 8:00 am