The practitioner in the room.

Most initiatives don't fail because of tools or strategy. They fail because people never aligned expectations, never surfaced the disagreement, and never said the hard thing out loud. This session shows leaders how small communication gaps quietly compound into failed programs — and where to intervene before they do.

Drawn from the CHIP program at Mr. Cooper: a system-of-record replacement spanning twelve projects, seventy-plus IT professionals, and integrations with more than fifty vendor systems, delivered with a 25% improvement in cost-per-unit performance.

You are negotiating far more than you think — scope, priorities, headcount, timelines, and authority — and almost none of it happens at a table with that word on the door. Doug helps audiences recognize the everyday negotiations they are already in, and handle them calmly, ethically, and effectively.

Doug authored the proposal that won a $1 billion, five-year VA portfolio loan servicing and REO disposition contract against more than fifty larger bidders, then served as onboarding program manager. The VA later extended it ten years.

Conflict is inevitable in any organization doing work that matters. Doug reframes it as a leadership skill rather than a personality flaw, and hands audiences practical tools for addressing it without damaging the relationships they still need on Monday.

From Code Gray, Doug's book on negotiation and conflict resolution, and the graduate course he teaches from it. A healthcare-specific version — Code Gray — is available for clinical, nursing, and hospital leadership audiences.

AI does not replace professionals. It exposes weak thinking and unclear communication — and it does so faster and more publicly than any manager ever did. This session is about how leaders, educators, and teams must think, write, and decide differently now that the first draft is free.

From the business communications textbook Doug authored for the AI era and teaches from at Texas Wesleyan University.

Most PMOs are founded in a moment of executive enthusiasm and quietly dismantled two budget cycles later. This session covers intake, governance, portfolio visibility, and the political work of making a PMO indispensable rather than merely tolerated.

Built the Enterprise PMO and IT PMO at Tarrant County College from scratch — 15 staff, 50+ concurrent projects, $95MM+ in portfolios — and the Workday implementation PMO at Precision Task Group.