KINGSTON SYMPOSIUM, Saturday, OCTOBER 03, 2026
PMFORGE 2026 - Speaker Lineup!
Room 108
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Teamwork Unleashed: Building Teams That Trust, Communicate and Adapt
Drawing on stories from elite sport and life with a guide dog, Victoria hands participants three practical frameworks for leading through pressure, uncertainty, and change. The Angus Principle — Trust Build trust before you need it. The Harness Connection — Communication Clear communication creates connection. The Next Stroke Mindset — Adaptability When you can't control the whole race, control the next stroke. They leave with: a real way to build trust early, a sharper standard for clear communication, and a mindset for staying effective when the plan falls apart.
Victoria Nolan
Victoria Nolan is a Paralympian, author, executive leader and motivational keynote speaker who spent 14 years competing on Canada’s national rowing team. Drawing on her experience in high-performance sport, leadership and navigating the world as a blind professional, Victoria helps teams build the trust, communication and adaptability they need to perform under pressure.
"The future belongs to teams that can move forward together, even when the path ahead isn’t clear."
Room 118
Breakout Session
Innovation Inside The Guardrails: Leading Change When The World Moves Faster Than Your Approval Chain
Standard project toolkits hold up until they meet a shadow spreadsheet in a bank, a seven-signature approval chain in a ministry, or a funder who rewrites scope mid-program. This masterclass is built for experienced project leaders who have outgrown framework reviews and now carry accountability for adoption without the authority to compel it. Drawing on a complex change the presenter led personally, it covers how to align stakeholders who report to everyone except you, how to read the different shapes resistance takes in public, private and nonprofit settings, and how to run small experiments that produce real results without tripping procurement, compliance or the board. Session Takeaways Un-block matrixed stakeholders: low-friction alignment tactics for teams outside your reporting line, built on behavioural drivers rather than roles or authority. Decode sector resistance: distinguish private-sector quiet non-adoption, public-sector sign-off cascades and nonprofit funder-driven scope shifts, and apply the right move for each. Innovate inside the guardrails: run micro-experiment cycles that hold up under audit, procurement and governance review. Make the work visible: turn status reporting into evidence of change leadership that executives and boards actually act on.
Norman Musengimana
Room 120
Breakout Session
Innovation in Practice
Innovation sounds exciting in theory. In practice, it is messy, uncertain and rarely follows the project plan. This session explores what it really takes to move an idea through uncertainty and turn it into something that creates value. Rather than focusing on familiar innovation theory, Shari Hughson will examine the often-overlooked intersection between innovation, project management and leadership: when planning creates false certainty, why resistance can be valuable data, how the wrong stakeholders can derail the right project, when to abandon a solution but protect the problem, and why sometimes the best project decision is to stop. Drawing on candid stories from her consulting practice, companies and projects, Shari will share both successes and the hard-earned lessons from initiatives that failed, changed direction or produced completely unexpected outcomes. Participants will leave with a different way of thinking about innovation within project leadership: knowing when to plan, when to learn, when to challenge, when to adapt, when to stop, and when to commit and deliver.
Shari Hughson
Shari started her first business in her 20s & won CIBC Entrepreneur of the Year before the age of 30. She recently won Canada’s Top 50 Most Influential Business & Entrepreneur Female Leaders of the Year in 2021 by SME Canada. Shari is an 8X serial entrepreneur and side-hustle educator at Queen’s University, teaching in innovation, disruptive technologies, entrepreneurship, and social impact strategy for people and the planet. Shari’s enterprises have been in MedTech, EdTech, and Health. Shari’s greatest company successes, were one bootstrapped company and one acquired company with VC support, building both to National scale before a successful exit (sale). She has also spent several years learning and building environmental home innovations in housing, water management, and circular food systems, while living off the land for 7 years, and has a TEDx talk about it. Shari currently has 2 active businesses, one in psychedelic services, another in Lyme disease treatment, and a thriving consulting business helping companies with digital products, tech transformation, and scale-up.
Room 118
Workshop
Making AI Work For You
Most project managers now have a paid AI account and use it as a faster search box. This 90 minute workshop is about the step after that: standing up an AI project support role that knows your project and stays useful between conversations. Working on your own laptop and your own live project, you will write terms of reference for that role the way you would write them for a person, load it with your charter, your latest status report and your risk register, and put it to work running a pre-mortem against a project you are managing right now. We will also look at what the published field research says about where AI assistance measurably improves professional work and where it measurably degrades it, because that difference is what decides which tasks you hand over and which never leave your desk. Bring a laptop. A free ChatGPT or Claude account carries the whole session, so a paid one is not required. Session Takeaway: Stand up a project support role: build a working AI assistant on your own account during the session, holding your charter, status report and risk register, so it keeps your project context instead of starting cold every time. Write its terms of reference: set its reporting line, its standing tasks, its escalation triggers and the work it must never touch, in a one page document you reuse on your next project and carry between tools. Red-team your own risk register: run a live pre-mortem that names what your register is missing, and leave with the prompt that produced it. Decide what you delegate: sort your recurring work into what AI drafts, what it only reviews, and what stays with you, using the evidence on where the help is real and where it is measurably not.
Shaun Cahill
Shaun Cahill teaches digital business, artificial intelligence and project management at Smith School of Business, where he has been a lecturer since 2012. He designs and teaches Smith courses on digital business and applied artificial intelligence.
He spent more than twenty years in information technology before turning to teaching. He began as a software developer in health care, moved into system design, networks, and implementation on projects across North America, and then led an operations and development team that became one of the first DevOps groups in Canada. He later moved into enterprise project and portfolio management, establishing one of the first project portfolio offices in the Canadian public sector and specialising in change management and software delivery.
Shaun holds an MBA and a BSc in Computer Science and Information Systems, both from Queen's University.
Making AI Work For You - Additional Session Information
The details below will help enhance your workshop experience!
- What attendees should bring?
- Bring a laptop rather than a phone. A paid ChatGPT or Claude account, if available, although a free account carries the whole session.
- Internet access for attendees
- The guest network is QueensU-Guest. Attendees join it on their laptop, get redirected to a registration page, and self-register with a personal email address for 24 hours of access, which they can repeat as often as they like. Anyone visiting from a university or college can use eduroam instead with their home credentials.
Room 120
Workshop
Managing Change - in Real Time
This is a practical, hands-on workshop for project professionals who are leading change while it is still moving. Rather than offering theory alone, this 90-minute session gives participants simple tools they can use immediately to diagnose where change is getting stuck, spot early signals of adoption or resistance, and respond before small issues become major barriers. Built around proven frameworks including Kotter, Prosci ADKAR, Bridges and Lewin, the workshop translates change management concepts into real-time practice. Participants will work through three interactive activities: identifying an ADKAR barrier point, building a one-page change radar, and responding to a live change scenario in a fast-paced team sprint. By the end of the session, attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how to manage change fatigue, use resistance as early data, equip managers before teams are impacted, and choose one concrete action they can take the following week. This session is ideal for anyone who wants practical, reusable techniques for helping people adopt change—not after the fact, but while there is still time to influence the outcome.
Margaret Reid
Margaret Reid has built her career around supporting practical, people-centered change. She spent 22 years at Queen’s University, with her final roles in information technology as a Senior Solutions Specialist and Senior Business Analyst. As Service Lead for the university’s learning management system, she brought this same thoughtful approach to navigating diverse interest holders in adopting a new platform, concentrating on ensuring people’s readiness and acceptance.
In 2022, Margaret decided to focus on change management full-time and shifted into healthcare, bringing her experience in supporting people through organizational transition to the Project Management Office of Kingston Health Sciences Centre (KHSC). She served as Change Management Lead for the implementation of a regional Health Information System and currently leads a change management team supporting the upgrade of KHSC’s staff scheduling and time capture solution—both initiatives that strengthen operational effectiveness and directly support the delivery of high-quality patient care.
Closing Session (Room 108)
Panel Discussion
Building Canada's Supercomputing Future
Canada-through the AI Sovereign Compute Infrastructure Program (AI SCIP) initiative is building its largest supercomputer. Queen's University has an under-evaluation application proposing to build one of the world's top ten public supercomputers, and two of the people leading that charge will be in the room!
Join moderator Bryon McConnell for a panel conversation with Dr. Ryan Grant and Dr. Ian Karlin, the Queen's University researchers at the heart of the national supercomputing bid. Together, they are arguably the only two people in Canada who have hands-on experience designing and procuring next-generation top 10 world ranked supercomputing systems, and they'll be sharing what that actually looks like from a project management perspective.
Dr. Grant returned to his alma mater in 2021 after nine years at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, one of the premier supercomputing organizations in the world. He now leads Queen's Computing at Extreme Scale Advanced Research Laboratory, one of the largest supercomputing software architecture labs globally. Dr. Karlin comes to Queen's from NVIDIA and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he led performance evaluation for El Capitan, which debuted as the most powerful supercomputer on Earth.
This session explores the human, technical, and organizational complexity behind projects of extraordinary scale, from managing government, industry, and academic stakeholders to the procurement and scheduling challenges that make supercomputer builds unlike almost anything else in engineering.
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Bryon McConnell
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Dr. Ian Karlin
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Dr. Ryan Grant
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