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.