Calendar of Events

Projects don’t fail because people are incompetent.
They fail because reality is messy, priorities collide, and systems crack under pressure.

Still, most organizations only talk about success.
This event is about everything else.

PMI and PwC invite you to an evening that challenges polished case studies and PowerPoint perfection. We are opening up conversations about failure in projects, portfolios, and PMOs—what really went wrong, what it exposed, and what actually changed as a result.

Because if we’re honest:

• Some failures are avoidable.
• Some failures are inevitable.
• And some failures are exactly what make organizations stronger, if they dare to learn from them.

Why This Event Is Different

This is not a “lessons learned” checkbox exercise.
This is about uncomfortable truths:

• When governance becomes a bottleneck
• When portfolios fail silently
• When PMOs are seen as bureaucracy instead of value
• When agility clashes with regulation
• When culture kills good intentions

And most importantly: what leaders and practitioners can do differently next time.

Program

15:30 | Talks that don’t sugarcoat reality
Real experiences from senior practitioners who have seen projects succeed—and fail—inside complex organizations.

18:00 | Dinner & Networking
Continue the conversation over dinner. No slides. No hierarchy. Just honest dialogue.

18:45 | Panel Discussion: From Failure to Antifragility
A sharp, interactive discussion on how organizations move beyond damage control toward learning, resilience, and antifragility with audience Q&A.

Speakers

Thomas Klysner

IPMA Assessor | Formerly Danske Bank & BEC
Title: To be announced

With hands-on experience from large-scale transformations in the financial sector, Thomas brings a reality check on why projects fail despite best intentions, mature frameworks, and experienced professionals—and where leadership, governance, and assessment models truly make a difference (or don’t).

Janick Wrona

Head of PMO, Sund & Bælt
Portfolio Failure and Antifragility as an Antidote

Failure doesn’t only happen at project level—it happens at portfolio level, often slowly and unnoticed.

Janick challenges the classic “control and prevent” mindset and argues that portfolios should be designed to benefit from failure, not collapse because of it. A provocative take on antifragility, risk, and how PMOs can enable learning instead of masking problems.

Naika Antialón Barrera, PMP

Manager | Decision Making & PMO, CIP Molecule Technologies

What It Really Takes to Build a PMO That Matters

Establishing a PMO in a fast-growing, highly regulated, technology-heavy renewable energy business sounds good on paper. In reality, it’s full of trade-offs, resistance, and hard decisions.

Naika will share unfiltered lessons from building and maturing a PMO where failure was a necessary teacher—covering:

1. Why unclear PMO mandates create failure by design
2. How standardization can quietly kill agility
3. When portfolio visibility becomes political
4. Why governance only works if data is trusted
5. How culture and people decide whether a PMO succeeds—or gets ignored

This is a talk about what had to be undone, not just what was built.

Who Should Be in the Room?

• Project, program, and portfolio managers
• PMO leaders and transformation sponsors
• Leaders tired of sanitized success stories
• Anyone who believes failure is feedback

If you’ve ever thought “this could have been handled better”, this event is for you.

Kind Regards,

PMI Denmark and PwC Team