Program
The full day, room by room
From the first coffee to the closing reception: five rooms, four parallel waves and seven moments where the whole fair comes together. Filter by room or by theme to build your own day.
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Program subject to change.
A day to inspire
Explore the program
1
Welcome and Registration
Welcome
Monica Dimitriu
Anja Vandenbergh
Thierry Geerts
Dare for tomorrow!
Our society is changing and calling for a new model. We live in a digital age where everything is connected, competition comes from unexpected sectors, and customers are in the driver’s seat. Data is gold, and sharing is the new having. This keynote explores how all generations must work in synergy to thrive in this new environment and how project managers must evolve alongside societal transformation. Key Learnings - Understand how digital transformation reshapes roles. - Recognize the need for intergenerational synergy. - Explore how project managers can adapt to future workforce demands.
Saskia van Uffelen
PANEL
Saskia van Uffelen
Jurgen Ingels
Thierry Geerts
Stefan Dierckx
Coffee Break
Time Value of Carbon - Bringing Power to the People
A person smiling in front of a bush AI-generated content may be incorrect.Time Value of Carbon (TVC) applies Discounted Cash Flow logic to carbon emissions, enabling project professionals to assign numeric targets and assess contributions to net-zero goals. This session explores TVC’s alignment with science-based frameworks and includes a case study on domestic house batteries demonstrating strong carbon and financial returns. Key Learnings Finance categories provide a useful lens for CO₂ reduction. TVC helps assess alignment with net-zero targets. TVC aligns with IPCC science and SBTi frameworks. Household energy storage offers high carbon IRR and financial return.
Stuart Thorp
Frank Wijnands
Stop Policing, Start Leading: How PMOs Drive Real Executive Decisions
Executives rarely lose sleep over late status reports. What keeps them up at night is whether the organization is investing in the right work and landing the value at pace. Most PMOs still define success by on-budget performance, compliance and governance theatre. Reports get filed, dashboards look pretty, and investment decisions are driven by gut feel, politics and whoever shouts loudest. This session shows why delivery-only PMOs are fading into irrelevance and how leading PMOs are stepping up as strategic partners without adding mountains of process. You will leave with a value-first prioritization playbook and a pathway to executive trust. Key Learnings Move the PMO beyond compliance into evidence-based strategic decisions. Use tools to prioritize by value and benefits. Eliminate portfolio politics while maintaining stakeholder trust. Build executive confidence and reposition the PMO as a strategic influencer.
Stuart Easton
Lunch & Networking
Sustainability: the key driver of Project Success
PMI research shows strong connections between sustainable practices and improved project outcomes. Yet many organizations struggle to translate ambition into execution. This session explores how project managers can embed sustainability into delivery, decision-making, and transformation. It also introduces PMI’s sustainability-focused certification and tools. Key Learnings Identify the role of project professionals in sustainable outcomes. Explore PMI tools and frameworks for sustainable delivery. Understand the value of PMI’s sustainability certification.
Lucila Dotto
Putting the pieces together: Strategic work allocation for business analysis assignments
Business analysis work is inherently complex. It involves navigating uncertainty, aligning stakeholders and structuring problems that are not yet clearly defined. BA work resembles a puzzle whose pieces differ in size, clarity and difficulty. In project environments, the project manager decides how that puzzle is divided. Delivery pressure pushes the hardest pieces towards the most experienced analysts, which limits the development of everyone else. Key Learnings Understand how work allocation impacts both delivery outcomes and team capability. Assign complexity levels that support growth without increasing risk. Recognize over-reliance on top performers and other allocation pitfalls.
AI Took my old job. Great!
When Generative AI first appeared, many project managers were delighted. Finally, something could take over the work nobody enjoyed: status reports, meeting minutes, steering committee slides. Then things changed. AI became surprisingly good at planning, risk management, stakeholder analysis and even coaching. It is entering the domains we considered our expertise, and the excitement has turned into concern. What is left of the project manager? After 25 years in project management, Bart Briers now works at the centre of Belgium's largest AI ecosystem. In this provocative yet optimistic keynote, he argues that the future is not replacement. It is reinvention. Key Learnings The real discomfort is identity disruption, not task automation. AI exposes what project management was never truly about. The future of project management is reinvention, not replacement.
Bart Briers
Coffee Break
FIRESIDE
Meinie Nicolai
Leading your project like you own it
Jurgen Ingels
Closing
Anja Vandenbergh
Networking & reception
2
Mindset over Method: The Four Intelligences of the #NextGenPM
P5 Workshop: Assessing Sustainability Impacts in Projects
This workshop introduces the P5 Standard, a globally recognized framework for assessing sustainability impacts across People, Planet, Prosperity, Process, and Product. Participants apply the framework to a case study, identify sustainability risks and opportunities, and explore how project decisions influence long-term outcomes. Key Learnings Understand the five dimensions of the P5 Standard. Identify sustainability impacts across a project lifecycle. Apply the P5 framework through a practical case study. Explore how sustainability enhances decision-making and value creation.
Annemaria De Sio
Shushan Khachatryan
SPONSORED PRESENTATION
IIL
When AI scope changes become compliance risks: the strategic PM’s role under the EU AI Act
AI compliance risks often emerge from project decisions such as scope changes or shifts in user groups. This session teaches project managers how to spot AI Act red flags early and connect regulatory requirements with familiar PM practices—scope management, change requests, vendor discussions, and go-live gates. Key Learnings Spot AI Act red flags in everyday project decisions. Understand how changed use affects purpose, risk, and responsibilities. Ask better questions during scope, vendor, and go-live discussions.
Maria Rudneva
3
SPONSORED PRESENTATION
PLANVIEW
The Hidden Layer: Measuring Inter-Team Dynamics in Complex Projects
Complex projects rarely fail within teams—they fail between them. This workshop introduces three constructs shaping project success: inter-team communication, inter-team psychological safety, and project identity. Participants reflect on their own environments and explore how systematic assessment can improve project outcomes. Key Learnings Recognise inter-team psychological dynamics as a measurable level. Apply communication, psychological safety, and project identity constructs. Identify how data-driven assessment can be implemented.
Sjir Uitdewilligen
The PM as a diplomate: navigating between organizational territories and kingdoms
Project managers depend heavily on stakeholder cooperation without having authority to compel it. Each stakeholder has objectives, priorities, and responsibilities, often leading to territorial behaviour and resistance. This workshop focuses on the emotional dimension of stakeholder management, exploring instinctive drives to protect territory and how PMs can build alliances and align contributions toward shared goals. Key Learnings Understand territorial behaviour in stakeholder dynamics. Apply diplomatic skills to build alliances. Align diverse stakeholder contributions toward common goals
Jan Van der Vurst
From Project Delivery to System Leadership: Lessons from Hybrid Offshore Wind
In hybrid offshore wind, success is no longer defined by delivery against scope, time and cost. Outcomes depend on aligning legal, financial, political and technical stakeholders across a fragmented ecosystem where no single actor controls the result. This session explores how project managers evolve from delivery-focused executors into strategic leaders, translating incentives across disciplines and moving complex environments toward decisions that are bankable, governable and implementable. The perspective transfers to any high-stakes, multi-stakeholder environment. Key Learnings Recognize when a project challenge is actually a system challenge. See how PMs create strategic value through integration. Move from coordinating stakeholders to shaping outcomes.
4
Globalising HR service delivery within a giant IT company
In 2022, Fujitsu launched a global HR transformation, an ambitious undertaking for an organization of roughly 120,000 employees across 45 countries. The initiative harmonizes HR processes and implements a single global HRIS platform. The complexity comes from scale and duration, diverse legal landscapes, cultural differences, a broad stakeholder network and hundreds of system integrations. In this session, Stijn shares how the assignment pushed him beyond a purely operational project management role. Key Learnings Evolve from project execution to strategic project leadership. Navigate governance structures and diverse stakeholder landscapes. Embed agile ways of working in a risk-averse organization.
Stijn Verschuren
From Vision to Action: Driving Strategic Value Through Portfolio Management
Most organizations do not struggle to generate ideas. They struggle to determine which initiatives deserve investment, how to prioritize competing opportunities, and how to translate those decisions into measurable business value. This session explores how Strategic Portfolio Management bridges the gap between strategy and execution. Through practical examples, attendees will see how a value-driven portfolio approach improves investment decisions and strengthens strategic alignment, and how AI supports scenario evaluation while human oversight and accountability remain. Key Learnings Explain why delivered projects still fail to generate business value. Apply value-driven prioritization to improve investment decisions. Use AI for scenario analysis while preserving human control.
PLANISWARE
Ha-Ha to Aha! Turning Humour into Leadership and Innovation
Joachim Dehais
Anja Vandenbergh
Building Psychological Safety and High-Performing Teams
Christophe De Vleeschouwer
Amit Arkad
5
CoP LS WORKSHOP
Johannes Vandaele
From Knowledge to Cognition: How AI Is Redefining Project Management Competence
Lubomira Mihailova