Faculty

Expect the best, plan for the worst and prepare to be surprised 

Description: Planning and understanding the work to complete our projects answers the question of how we are going to achieve project goals and success, but can be a challenging moving target.  Even the best laid plans have a tendency to take us down unexpected paths.  Our October session will be comprised of a panel to discuss three very different types of projects, how the project managers approached planning, tracked the work to identify when things were deviating from the expected plan, escalated, and re-planned.  Our panel will be comprised of Wendy Hague, who will refer to the International Student Return Plan project, Connie van Oostveen who will refer to the Migration to Sharepoint Online agile project, and Meg Ronson who will refer to the Legacy Leadership Lab project.

Speaker bios: 

Wendy Hague

Wendy has extensive project management experience gained through working on projects at a number of different organizations throughout her career.  She obtained her PMP (Project Management Professional) designation in 2001.  Wendy has worked at the University for over 8 years as a project manager in the PMO within IST.  

Wendy is currently managing the Microsoft 365 program and some of the projects within the program, as well as a project to evolve the edtech ecosystem at the University, and replacement projects for LearnTools and Onbase.

Connie van Oostveen

Connie van Oostveen, BMath, PMP, PMI-ACP is a project manager in the Project Management Office. As a project manager, she has worked primarily on a number of information technology systems implementations over her 26 year career at UW and is currently working on the Migration to SharePoint Online, Quest in Cloud and the next phase of the Graduate Admissions and Recruitment projects.

Meg Ronson

Meg Ronson (she/her) is an emerging leader in cooperative and social enterprise development, research, and innovation, specializing in alternative business succession solutions and community economic development. As Innovation Lab Manager at University of Waterloo’s Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (WISIR), Meg manages a continuously adapting team and series of continuously evolving stakeholder engagement groups. Meg was the Project Manager of WISIR’s major $500k+ social finance project, a partnership with the Government of Canada’s Investment Readiness Program. She has held enterprise and economic development positions at post-secondaries, non-profits and for-profits, always with an eye for changing the way Canadians think about and access the social economy. Meg holds a Masters of Economic Development and Innovation at the University of Waterloo, a Certificate of Economics at Ryerson University and a Bachelor of Humanities at Carleton University.

Facilitators: Alice Raynard, Connie van Oostveen

A project always has some uncertainty that can impact a project’s objectives and outcomes, should problems occur. At the University of Waterloo, we have a University Risk Management program (URM) which has some key University risks identified and some good resources that you can use for managing the uncertainty. The presenters will make the case for project risk management, discuss where URM fits in, illustrate with some project examples from across the University and share resources. Come prepared to discuss your projects and how project risk management and the URM program does and can help.

Speaker bios: 
Alice Raynard is an Associate University Secretary in the Secretariat. She oversees the University Risk Management, Internal Audit and Statutory Compliance programs. Connie van Oostveen is a Sr. Project Manager in IST’s Project Management Office.
 

Register for this event: https://uwaterloo.gosignmeup.com/public/Course/browse?courseid=4056

Continuing with our Agile theme from April, where Agile concepts were introduced, our May Project and Portfolio Community of Practice virtual session is a panel discussion with Agile practitioners from across campus facilitated by Tara Hillis from IST’s Project Management Office. As an attendee you will gain insight into Agile practices and learn about estimation, Agile teams, retrospectives and more.

Our guest panelists include:

Alexander Kelley --I work with the student association on campus as Marketing Manger. My background is in design and marketing & I am an avid reader and love business and marketing books. Hacking Marketing caught my eye and I thought it was about improving campaigns effectiveness; turns out it was about borrowing ideas from the Agile software world and applying to Marketing departments. I was recently promoted to Marketing Manager and pitched the idea to my director—it looked like it would solve all of our issues that we’ve been having connecting with students so we are currently giving it our best shot. (Note: Alexander’s participation will be pre-recorded.)

Yasemin Ozderya is a Project Coordinator within Campus Housing. She serves as a Scrum Master to two of the six Scrum Teams within the department. Although new to her role and “being Agile”, she is taking an active role in supporting and educating Campus Housing on Agile values with their adoption of Agile/Scrum. She’s learned to successfully position herself as a point of clarity, direction, and energy within a project; connecting and improving communication between the 'work' with the 'people'.

Joe Kwan has over 20 years of experience in the web and software development industry, and is currently the Manager, Web Development in Information Systems and Technology (IST) where he oversees development of both the WCMS and Portal. Joe has been with the university for six years, and prior to his role in IST, was the Manager, User Experience and Information Architecture in University Relations. Joe has also participated in various Scrum team roles throughout his career ranging from developer to product owner.

Diana Timmermans started at the University of Waterloo in 2016 and is currently in the School of Computer Science managing the School’s renovation projects. She is also the Project Manager on Computer Science Computing Facility’s (CSCF) project to build a new storage system that will store all CS’s data.  Diana achieved her PMP in 2018 and is now working towards her MBA.  Throughout her career, she has overseen many projects and is active in the Project Management Institute (PMI) community in the professional development, education and certification areas. Prior to UW, she was a Program Manager at Western University. Diana loves bringing  individuals together and watching projects reach completion successfully. Outside of her work life she plays volleyball, hiking, running (anything outdoors) and spending time with her family. 

Register for this event: https://uwaterloo.webex.com/uwaterloo/onstage/g.php?MTID=ee9fbcf459d7e1d51ed7ea5f68c8f35b6 

Registration is only open for @uwaterloo.ca email addresses; teleconference is not enabled for this event