Digital PM Summit Asheville

Monday, October 19 - Tuesday, October 20, 2026

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Meet Your Digital PM Summit Speakers

More speakers and the full agenda will be announced soon!

CRYSTAL J. RICHARDS MHA, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSM

Crystal Richardsis the founder of MindsparQand author of PMP Exam Prep for Dummies®.

With more than 20 years of experience and 65,000+ professionals trained across the globe and across corporate, government, healthcare, and nonprofit environments, she has built a reputation for closing the gap between having a title and knowing how to lead.

A keynote speaker and workshop facilitator, her sessions are direct, energizing, and designed for audiences ready for an honest conversation about what it takes to move work forward

Keynote

Recess for Grown-Ups: Why Your Best Project Thinking Happens When You Stop Working

Most project managers learn early that their value lives in availability, which means staying reachable and responsive even when the work and their own judgment are telling them to stop. What looks like dedication from the outside often produces worse decisions, weaker creative thinking, and the kind of low-grade exhaustion that becomes someone's whole personality before they notice it happened.

This session argues that recess, structured and unapologetic, isn't a self-care indulgence dressed up in a friendlier word. It's a performance practice that the best project leaders treat the way serious athletes treat recovery. This talk makes the case that the project managers doing the strongest work over time are not grinding harder than everyone else. They're recovering on purpose.

Victoria Wheelehan

Victoria Wheelehan is a Senior Product Development Engineer and Technical Program Manager with over a decade of experience leading complex initiatives across manufacturing, engineering, and digital transformation.

Her career began on the factory floor, where she progressed through facilities engineering and enterprise project leadership before stepping into global digital transformation roles spanning multiple sites and countries.

Victoria brings a grounded, operations‑first perspective to digital transformation, helping organizations adopt digital tools in ways that respect legacy environments while empowering frontline teams and delivering measurable business outcomes.

Her work focuses on aligning technology with real business; she is passionate about practical, people-centered transformation and believes the most successful digital initiatives are those that amplify human expertise rather than replace it. A PMP certified project management professional and international speaker, Victoria has shared her insights at forums including PMO Global Alliance Career Week and the Dubai International Project Management Forum.

Presentation

From Factory Floor to Digital Transformation

Digital transformation sounds great in theory. In reality, it often means navigating resistance, disconnected systems, messy data, unclear ownership, and teams trying to keep day-to-day operations moving while everything changes around them.

In this session, Victoria Wheelehan shares lessons learned from leading a global digital transformation initiative inside a traditional manufacturing environment. Through practical examples and real-world challenges, this talk explores what it takes to create alignment, integrate systems and teams, and deliver measurable results without losing sight of the humans doing the work.

What you’ll take away

Ways to address resistance and build buy-in for change
Lessons for integrating systems, data, and teams
Practical approaches to cross-functional collaboration
Tips for measuring success beyond “we launched it”
Real-world insights from digital transformation inside manufacturing environments