Calendar of Events

Over the past several years our conference has consistantly grown and improved. This year the Oregon Project Management Advisory Board and the Project Management Institute’s Willamette Valley Chapter are partnering to bring you an even bigger and better professional development conference at the Salem Convention Center.

We will be including more time between sessions to enhance the increased networking opportunities that go with a growing conference.

We will also be adding another track for breakout sessions. The tracks for this year will be:

• Professional Development
• Organizational Change Management
• Business Analysis

How can we as professionals thrive in today’s rapidly changing world? How can we lead our organizations to adapt and succeed? This conference seeks to address the effects of accelerating change and their solutions in the context of individual and organizational practice.

The core problem is simple: Things are changing so fast it’s getting harder and harder just to keep up. Institutions that serve as the bedrock of our society are even slower to adapt, in large part because they depend on individuals to lead adaptive change.

Every day we rely on practices and processes to get things done. Of course these are built on assumptions -- assumptions which are fundamentally static. Yet we have a tendency to treat “best practices” as if they were built on natural laws, true under all circumstances. While this may have been an effective approach in relatively stable times, that’s not so much the case anymore. According to LinkedIn’s 2017 Workplace Learning Report, the average shelf-life of professional skills is less than five years.

Similar reports by the World Economic Forum indicate life-time learning is now key to a successful and rewarding career. And change driven by a host of factors such as Moore’s Law only continues to accelerate. We don’t live in a static world, but an increasingly dynamic one. In practice that means we have to critically examine practices and processes to determine their effectiveness and apply them appropriately under dynamically changing circumstances.

Even if we admit to ourselves that the world is changing and we need to change with it, learning to adapt well to an emerging, fluid reality can be really tough! Just becoming aware of the assumptions we operate under as individuals is difficult. Challenging those assumptions is even harder, and accepting that we ourselves fundamentally have to change is even harder yet. But no matter how hard, adapting to change is a matter of survival.

Is there a point at which the rate of change reaches a threshold where assumptions that serve as operating systems in our daily lives and for our global civilization break down?  If so, how close are we to that point? What do we do about it?

There is no simple, single solution to coping with accelerating change. The good news is we can move the conversation forward at this conference with a solutions-based mind frame. We can create a platform for presenters to address the many faces of accelerating change in our world today and provide attendees with tools to better confront, adapt to and embrace our emerging future.

See Program Schedule

Group registration is not compatible with all systems due to firewalls. If there is a problem registering your group please contact pdc2018@pmiwv.org.