Conference keynote speakers

CLAIRE RUTKOWSKI
Speaker's Bio
Claire joined Bentley in 2016 from MWH Global where she served as chief information officer, responsible for delivering IT strategy, services, and support to 7,000 engineering professionals around the world. At Bentley, Claire leads the company’s global IT organization, shaping and delivering a technology agenda across Bentley’s global business. By collaborating with executive leadership teams, she ensures Bentley leverages the most advanced technology solutions to achieve the goals of the company and its users. Claire holds a bachelor’s degree from Penn State University and has received numerous awards, most notably Constructech’s Top 50 Women in Construction and Nextera’s Top 80 CIOs.
Presentation Abstract
Are we schedule-creators, task-drivers, and scope and budget controllers? Sure…but that is a sliver of what we do. In addition to thinking about HOW we deliver all those things in the context of waterfall versus agile versus some hybrid, we also need to think about WHAT we do in terms of broadening the meaning of project management to include business consultant, change agent, product manager (for a time), and overall ‘glue’ between IT and the business. And we need to think about WHY. For some of us, the project alone is our motivation. We want to deliver quality and scope within a certain timeline and budget. But for others, project management can be an excellent springboard to other things. In this presentation, I will explore not only the roles the project manager can play, but also why these roles position us as the leaders of the future.

Martynas Gedminas
Speaker's Bio
Emergency medicine physician who is also responsible for safety and quality in the Emergency department of the Republican Hospital of Šiauliai.
Previously lead the Lithuanian Junior Doctors association with initiatives to promote management principles, increase transparency and the quality of medical education in the health sector.
Personal interests include stress resilience, yoga and meditation.
Presentation Abstract
By the time you finish reading this sentence, thousands of cells in your body will die and thousands of new ones will be created. Everything in this world is constantly changing and interacting with each other.
Responding and adapting to this constant change are the essential qualities of a living being. Naturally, this is also the reason of success in managing projects, leading teams and taking other sorts of responsibilities.
Our minds, though, have a tendency to stick to something known and comfortable, thus making us less open to new possibilities. We will look into what is the mechanism behind this and what tools we can use to overcome it.
Conference speakers

Danutė Ivanauskaitė - Levišauskienė
Speaker's Bio
Experienced Project and Program manager with 15 years of work experience. Started as IT solution consultant, and then worked as business consultant & manager at EY, engaged in various international public & private sector projects. Being member of Baltic SEB team from 2012.
Presentation Abstract
Imagine you need to implement core banking IT platform, effecting 3 geographical sites, changing 80% of main client offering, making impact for ~ 2 mln customers over one weekend. What king of methodology and tools You would apply?
Let’s rethink together, what methods and tools work for large scale programs, what are those aspects that worth considering before applying; what are key lessons learnings from SEB Baltic team.

Scott Ambler
Speaker's Bio
Scott is the Vice President, Chief Scientist of Disciplined Agile at Project Management Institute. Scott leads the evolution of the Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit and is an international keynote speaker. Scott is the (co)-creator of the Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit as well as the Agile Modeling (AM) and Agile Data (AD) methodologies. He is the (co-)author of several books, including Choose Your WoW!, An Executive’s Guide to the Disciplined Agile Framework, Refactoring Databases, Agile Modeling, Agile Database Techniques, and The Object Primer 3rd Edition. Scott blogs regularly at ProjectManagement.com and he can be contacted via pmi.org.
Presentation Abstract
PMI’s Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit provides straightforward guidance to help teams and organizations choose their way of working (WoW) in a context-sensitive manner, providing a solid foundation for business agility. An important choice that teams need to make is the lifecycle that they will follow. Where an Agile Framework will prescribe a single lifecycle, the DA tool kit guides you through choosing the right one for your team given the situation that it faces.

Vidas Petraitis
Speaker's Bio
Experienced business developer & Lean practitioner. 10+ years’ experience of providing effectiveness & improvement consultancies to 140 companies and organizations. Public speaker and moderator of multiple forums for business decision makers (CEO level).
Presentation Abstract
A number of organisations fail to implement Lean successfully, cannot achieve the desired results and thus give up and return to their usual practices. The report highlights 9 major mistakes that occur during the process of Lean implementation and offers ways to avoid them.

Dr. Al Zeitoun
Speaker's Bio
Dr. Al Zeitoun, PMI Fellow is a Future of Work, business optimization and operational performance excellence thought leader with global experiences in strategy execution. His experiences encompass leading organizations; delivering their Enterprise Digital Transformation and Program Management Offices; guiding fitting frameworks implementations; and using his empathy, insights, and collaboration strengths to successfully envision new business models and execute complex missions across diverse cultures globally.
Presentation Abstract
The future of work, the Project Economy, and its changing wave put great pressure on the human equation. During this session, Dr. Zeitoun will share experiences across global boundaries, coupled with insights from interviews with leaders from across industries. He will illustrate the attributes that collectively build this growth and adaptive mindset. The resulting agility diagnoses will allow for shaping how “humans 3.0” will likely shape an impactful future of work.

Ina Vaitkevičė
Speaker's Bio
Ina Vaitkevice, senior project manager at biotechnological company Thermo Fisher Scientific, leading new product development projects. I have previously held Research & Development as well as Intellectual Property positions in the company.
I have earned a Master degree in Biochemistry from Vilnius University in 2006 and MBA from Vilnius University Business School in 2011.
Presentation Abstract
Success is a journey of continuos improvement. Thermo Fisher Scientific relies on Practical Improvement (PPI) Business System to create a culture of exceptional performance and strengthen our position as the world leader in serving science. PPI is not about creating extra work. It‘s about how we work and play a part in making better every day. This is how we deliver the best products and services to our customers, how we lead our projects, and at the same time make our jobs easier for our colleagues.

Ray Mead
Speaker's Bio
Ray is founder and director of p3m global, a specialist Portfolio, Programme and Project management consultancy.
Ray is a recognised thought leader in the P3M profession with over 20 years advising to Board level across many different countries and industries. He is a regular contributor to PMI Global Congress events in the USA and EMEA and also as a voluntary mentor for the PMI Educational Foundation (PMIef).
Ray has also served as an elected Councillor for the City of Southampton and is the author of the acclaimed book ‘Delivering Successful PMOs‘ published by Routledge.
Over his varied career Ray has been closely involved in the creation of transformational capability through overseeing development and deployment of programme and portfolio management methodologies, Enterprise PMOs and organisational P3M governance as well as project competence development through training, coaching and mentoring.
Ray has led some of the largest known organisational maturity assessments on Governments and FTSE 100 organisations, using P3M3Ò and OPM3 frameworks, which have derived £multi-million of savings opportunities and led to better corporate decision-making.
Ray has lived and worked in Spain, China, Australia and the Middle East. He is now based in Hampshire, England and works internationally.
Presentation Abstract
For over a decade now we have been told that ‘Waterfall’ is a clunky, dated approach that is not focused on value while ‘Agile’ is the solution to all our problems. This has left PMOs struggling with how to reconcile these two, seemingly opposite, ways of working and how to stay relevant in predominantly Agile environments.
In this talk, Ray will be uncovering the origin of this bimodal thinking and examining how well it reflects the reality of transformational work in the 21st century.
Ray will be drawing on his experience of working with traditional, agile and hybrid environments to look at some of the challenges and implications of organisations moving to a ‘multimodal’ model. He will also then look at some practical suggestions PMOs can take to right-size governance and ensure the right approach for the right project.

Vaidotas Levickis

Darius Gabalis
Speaker's Bio (Vaidotas)
I specialize in the field of managment and organizational development. The last three years of my professional life have been a dedicated contribution to a particular professional services company Aros Marine that delivers premium quality interior and HVAC services in the cruise ship industry. My role was to aid the company in evolution from a low-cost manpower provider to one of the top 10 players in the field.
Speaker's Bio (Darius)
Shipbuilding is my second nature. Specifically, I have a strong professional interest in developing management instruments to bolster operational effectiveness and efficiency at any given project phase. Over the course of the last three years, I focused on the development of core project management systems and PM’s professional growth.
Presentation Abstract
This practical business case presents our business transformation story from being a low-cost manpower provider to becoming professional a project management service provider in a three-year period. The presentation will provide a brief contextual introduction to project management evolution in the cruise ship construction industry. It will proceed with an assessment of our (or not) readiness to embrace significant cognitive and technical pressures to deliver a premium quality product. In the process, it had become evident that some of the issues can’t be adequately addressed at the microlevel of their individual skills improvement The presentation will review our failed and successful attempts to build strong organizational support through hybrid forms of active planning using lean/agile methodologies.

Ian Sharpe
Speaker's Bio
People and better service experiences (requesting and fulfilling) are at the heart of everything I lead, which is why organisations I work with have achieved real value (improved satisfaction, cost-out and sustainable operations), from their investments. I deliver that through tight project, program, portfolio management, and make it sustainable by building strong leaders and high-performance teams along the way to truly shift organisational service culture and capability.
My career encompasses leading on major organisational transformations. I’ve had the great fortune in my career in working with clients internationally, from NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to Defence and Fortune 500 companies.
I am proud to have served the PM Industry as both Chair and Non-Executive Director on the Board of the Australian Institute of Project Management, and have served in multiple senior capacities in governance, transformation and capability since 2006.
Presentation Abstract
There is a real danger today that project delivery is seen as a ‘single hammer’ approach, where every delivery need is treated in the same way. This presentation outlines how to avoid the traps of choosing or sticking with the wrong delivery method.

Tomas Ruzgys
Speaker's Bio
Tomas has 20 years of experience in team leading, digital transformation projects, IT project management, change management, IT management, business processes, sales of cloud solutions and training in multiple countries. He has a deep experience in relationships and sales processes with government and academic organizations.
Nevertheless, he has 10+ years’ experience in sales area as product and solutions sales manage and is working on digital transformation projects in enterprises for cloud adoption and usage.
As for project delivery experience, Tomas has IT infrastructure and sales project management experience in Denmark and Lithuania, deep knowledge with delivering projects in government organizations and remote leading of international project team with people from Denmark, Lithuania, India in the same projects.
Presentation Abstract
Project management has been evolving over time due to the continuous improvement of technology. In today‘s remote world management of teams and communication has become a crucial part of PM with Artificial Intelligence becoming one of the main technologies for successful management in the future. In his presentation, Tomas will deep dive into how cultural change, new tools have changed the way projects are managed, will provide best practises of how to lead remote teams and discuss the capabilities of AI in PM.