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."
Break Out 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, & 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.
Workshop
AI Productivity at Work
Project managers rely on AI to draft plans, analyze information, and accelerate daily work, yet many lack a clear mental model of how these systems operate. This 90 minutes workshop explains what happens in the background when AI generates output and why quality varies. You will learn how to design prompts, validate results, and build repeatable personal workflows. The session balances practical productivity gains with a grounded understanding of AI behaviour and limits. Session Takeaway: Describe at a high level how large language models process and generate text.
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.
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
Closing Session
Panel Discussion
Building Canada's Supercomputing Future
Canada—through the Sovereign Compute Infrastructure Programme 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 45-minute 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.
