2019

Skip Weisman, a former professional baseball executive and professional speaker, business coach, and author, works with organizations that want to create championship teams and work environments that increases productivity, performance and profits. Skip’s presentations provide inspiring stories with lessons from his leadership career offering practical, state-of-the-art tips, tools, and techniques, to transform communication that leads to championship performance. Skip served 5 baseball franchises as CEO starting at age 26 leading teams affiliated with the Boston Red Sox, Cincinnati Reds, New York Mets, Seattle Mariners, Tampa Bay Rays, and Texas Rangers. Since 2012 Skip has spoken as a keynote speaker to audiences as large as 1,500 at corporate and association conferences across North America, including 36 different PMI chapters, 16 PMI symposium keynotes, 45-session seminars and over 70 PMI presentations. In 2018 Skip published his first book Overcoming The 7 Deadliest Communication SINs: A New Standard for Workplace Communication, which is one of his signature talk topics.

Carolyn Smith has over 20 years of experience leading and managing PMO offices – ranging from large, cross-functional, multi-year projects to IT Program Offices. She has overseen the delivery of hundreds of projects and has repeated successes in building PMO organizations and transforming processes to accelerate delivery of business value.

Joel Albizo has more than 30 years of association management experience and is seen as an innovator within the association CEO community. In addition to original research and presentations on the competencies and development of future association CEOs, he is attuned to digital transformation and other trends impacting the nonprofit sector. Previously, he served as CEO for the Council of Landscape Architectural Registration Boards (CLARB), a regulatory body that works to protect the public’s health, safety, and welfare by establishing licensure standards for the practice of landscape architecture. Albizo earned his bachelor’s degree in mass communications at Towson University in Maryland. He is president of the Federation of Associations of Regulatory Boards, and a former board member and treasurer for the American Society of Association Executives.

Sachin Melwani gets problems solved through his ‘disruptive creativity’. Leveraging his strong knowledge of ERP transformation from the Client, Prime Integrator and Tier Supplier perspectives, through DADA he now aims to bring genuine innovation to the traditional consultancy model by offering a unique “Consultancy as a Subscription” service. The advantage over a traditional consultancy is that DADA provides an economical and responsive way to support any project by offering a “Consulting Service at Contractor prices”.

Bekka believes everyone deserves great leadership at work, that’s why she spends her time enabling technical experts sine as leaders while maintaining their specialist skills. She specialises in developing people to lead in projects and rapidly changing environments and also consult on the people elements of change programmes. Bekka is a world-class coach with 30 yrs experiences making change happen as a leader, project manager & coach, across a broad spectrum of functions in a wide range of industries globally. She succeeded in high profile roles including in Organisational Design with Cadbury Schweppes. She’s worked with household brands, businesses in the technical arena & with some incredible service businesses. Bekka has also run her own businesses & lead volunteer teams. She put clients first, listens, understands, energises & brings a different way of thinking. She is known for getting to the heart of the matter & seeing things from different perspectives, then finding pragmatic solutions that get results. Bekka is also the host of The Curious Choice Leader Podcast.

Andy Kaufman, PMP is a recognized expert on leadership and project management, helping organizations around the world improve their ability to lead and deliver. Andy works with leaders at the United Nations and other global clients to improve their ability to deliver on their initiatives. Before becoming an internationally sought-after speaker, Andy started as a software developer and was promoted into management for all the wrong reasons! He is the author of three books and host of the acclaimed People and Projects Podcast, which provides free PDUs through interviews and insights for his global listeners.

Colin D. Ellis is an international award-winning project management speaker and author and helps organizations around the world to build delivery cultures that everyone wants to be part of. He does that now because for 30 years he was a permanent employee of other people’s delivery cultures in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia and most of them were, well, not great. He’s written three best selling project management books (including his latest one The Project Book) and speaks with energy, passion, humor, and honesty (remember that?) about the challenges that organizations face in creating project leaders and the cultures required to deliver successfully every time. Born in Liverpool, UK Colin now lives with his family in Melbourne, Australia.

Elizabeth Harrin, FAPM, is an author and mentor who helps project managers and their teams get more done with less stress. She does that through straight-talking, real-world advice, based on her 20 years in project management roles. Elizabeth has written 5 books about project management: Shortcuts to Success: Project Management in the Real World (which was a finalist in the Management Book of the Year Awards 2014 and now in its second edition), Collaboration Tools for Project Managers, Communicating Change, Project Manager, and Customer-Centric Project Management. She is currently working on a new book on stakeholder engagement which will be out in 2020. She’s also the award-winning blogger behind the site A Girl’s Guide to Project Management. Elizabeth holds degrees from the University of York and Roehampton University. She supports project managers through her mentoring programme and also contributes to a variety of other initiatives including sitting on the advisory board for the RISE Being Lean and Seen programme at Liverpool John Moores University.

A Principal Sales Engineer with Clarizen, offering technical and strategic support towards Clarizen’s sales initiatives. With 13 years of experience, Bryan has predominantly worked in the mobile industry supporting customers in large enterprises such as Ford, Cisco, Verizon, Carnival Cruise Lines as well as small startups and individual developers.

André Kriger leads the IT organization from Telefonica Vivo, responsible for formulating their vision and execution of their respective strategies. Under his purview, IT is responsible for serving almost 100 million customers in Brazil. Within Vivo there are over 6500 personnel working at IT, both insourced and outsourced. As the Chief Information Officer, André concentrates on enabling key business transformations projects in B2C and B2B markets, focusing to improve the Customer Experience through adopting the newest technologies and creating platforms that meet rapidly the scale efficiency and provide agile service delivery, leveraging the company leadership for their innovative achievements spanning digital transformation. André also leads the IT2X Program which goal is to multiply the throughput to the business and better delivery time for the projects executed in IT. In his one-decade career inside Telefonica Vivo, André has held a variety of other senior leadership positions, including Vice President of Customer Care, responsible for managing 25K people and partners as well recognized for the FTTXcellence Award in 2013, being the pioneer in expanding fiber technology in Brazil. André has a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from FAE, Curitiba Brazil and MBA from the FW Ollin Business School at Babson College in Massachusetts. André has been appointed as finalist for the TM Forum Excellence Awards 2019.