Innovative Problem Solving

Learn from Keynote Speakers and the award-winning authors Karin Hurt and David Dye ​with featured book Courageous Cultures​. 

What would happen if every member of your project team came to work focused on finding solutions and creating better results? 

Based on ground-breaking new research in innovation and problem-solving, you'll learn what project leaders like you are doing to build more creative and solutions-oriented teams.  

We'll explore the root causes of FOSU (fear of speaking up), ways to show up more courageously yourself, and techniques to your team’s fears and frustration into innovation. You’ll leave with practical tools you can apply right away. 

Join us for a morning of exciting topics and thought-provoking presentations aiming to help us all manage problem solving in today's changing world.

Agenda

Keynote Speakers

Karin Hurt and David Dye

Let’s Grow Leaders

Karin Hurt and David Dye help human-centered leaders resolve workplace ambiguity and chaos, so that they can drive innovation, productivity and revenue without burning out employees. As CEO and President of Let’s Grow Leaders, they are known for practical tools and leadership development programs that stick. Karin and David are the award-winning authors of five books including, Courageous Cultures: How to Build Teams of Micro-Innovators, Problem Solvers, and Customer Advocates and Winning Well: A Manager's Guide to Getting Results-Without Losing Your Soul  

Featured Speakers

Taneshia "T" Canady Barton

Google Cloud, Customer Success

Taneshia ("T") Canady Barton is a forward-leaning transformation and delivery executive obsessed with evolving organizations into their "next best self" and building high-performing teams focused on reimagining the future, cultivating the entrepreneurial spirit and innovation culture within corporate environments via strategic alignment and disciplined execution. Across industries and functions, Taneshia has become known as a simplifier, diplomatic disruptor, force multiplier, and storyteller and has built a track record for bringing broad corporate visions to life by developing and executing hyperconnected, evidence-based roadmaps to lead organizations through periods of significant change and ambiguity.

Over the past 15 years, Taneshia has been honored to serve as an Executive Management Consultant and Chief Strategist focused on developing and executing strategies for game-changing growth events (from post-close M&A activity to starting new business units on foreign soil). She currently serves as a Digital Enterprise Transformation Leader within the newly formed Customer Success organization at Google, where she wears the hats of Chief Strategist and Chief Transformation Officer for industry leaders undergoing digital transformation. Prior to Google, she established and led the Security & Resiliency Organization's program delivery practice and digital transformation portfolios within Dell Technologies, while successfully envisioning, incubating and scaling several complex, wide-reaching customer engagement initiatives that led to significantly improved customer experience, employee productivity, and product delivery. Throughout her career, Ms. Barton has been honored to help global enterprise clients establish innovation-focused delivery practices, including her tenure as a Global Service Delivery Lead within Microsoft Premier Services and as the co-founder of the boutique consultancy, ThinkPower.

T. Canady Barton earned her MBA from Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business and a Bachelors of Science in Chemical Engineering from Texas A&M University. Taneshia is also a certified scrum master and has been a PMP since 2007.

Hakob Avetisyan

California State University Fullerton, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Hakob Gevorg Avetisyan, is an Associate Professor of Construction Engineering and Project Management at California State University Fullerton, in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Avetisyan received his doctoral degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering (Project Management) from the University of Maryland (College Park, MD). Prior to the doctoral degree he received three MS and M.Eng degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering and in Environmental Policy and Planning. Since the first years of his academic journey he tackled research projects that addressed the real – world challenges of project management, environmental sustainability, energy, transportation and construction industries. He has number of publications in prestigious journals related to research in construction engineering and management, transportation and energy industries, port security and seismic analysis of bridges. Avetisyan with co-authors received a Best Paper Award from ASCE Journal of Construction Engineering and Management for developing a decision support model for construction equipment selection. In 2015 Avetisyan proposed the idea of Construction Equipment Sustainability Index for informed decision-making. In 2019, Avetisyan proposed the Fragile method for managing projects. His primary research interests are in project management with emphasis in construction engineering and management, operations research, economics and security with a particular focus on developing optimization and game-theoretic models for processes in the construction, energy, and transportation industries, environmental sustainability, civil systems engineering, water/wastewater treatment and distribution, and system resilience/recovery.

John Johnson

University of Maryland, College Park, Project Management Center for Excellence

John Johnson serves as the Strategic Program Manager at the University of Maryland, College Park, Project Management Center for Excellence. He leads the initiatives that help grow the Project Management Center for Excellence across its three pillars: Academic Excellence, Outreach and Professional Development, and Research. He is primarily responsible for the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) program, which currently is educating over 200,000 enrolled learners across the world. Mr. Johnson also teaches graduate courses on Agile and Predictive management at the University of Maryland’s Project Management Program.

Mr. Johnson has led projects from small teams of five to large teams of 50 or more delivering across fields of civil engineering, software development, management consulting, data science, and education working with small one-person consultancies, many large programs in the DoD (Navy, Air Force, Marines), and entire agencies in the case of the National Archives.