 Kay Wais is the President and founder of Successful Projects and she also is a very experienced project management instructor. She is known for her passion for the effectiveness of project management education and her innovative ways of teaching project management. She has 21 years of project management experience, a Master's degree in Project Management, a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration and Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI). She has helped many students become PMP certified.
Kay has presented numerous project management workshops and classes and has trained many other project management instructors. She has taught project management for many years at Viterbo University, UW-La Crosse, UW-Green Bay, UW-Superior and Western Technical College. She assists with project management curriculum design for many colleges, corporate training programs, and publishers (such as McGraw-Hill). She started the Certificate of Project Management program initially with the University of Wisconsin SBCD offices.
Innovation of has invented numerous training products including the Project Risk board game, scheduling game, earned value simulation, estimating game, and the success cards. She also facilitates our weekly PMP exam prep study group. She founded the La Crosse PMI chapter, became its first president, and serves on the board. She is also active in the PMI Risk Special Interest Group, Counsultant's Community of Interest, and PMI's Education Special Interest Group.
Kay and her husband, Ed Wais, founded The AVS Group in 1989, AVS Properties in 1998, and Successful Projects in 2001, all of which still operate under their ownership today. They live in Dresbach, Minnesota. 
Amanda Symonds, Director of Successful Projects Asia Pacific, is Prince2, ITIL and MSP certified and is a project management instructor. She is located in Melbourne, Australia. The Prince2 certification is popular in Europe and Australia. And through Amanda, Successful Projects is better able to provide their students with knowledge on both certification approaches and this is a big benefit for larger businesses that manage projects across various regions of the world. Ms. Symonds also works as a project manager for the Australian Department of Justice. She worked in project management in the UK and in a project management capacity for Hewlett Packard for over 6 years.  Sean earned his BS and MS in Mechanical engineering in the early 1990’s from top ranked schools and he is currently pursuing an MBA at the University of Indiana. Sean is a certified Project Management Professional. In addition, he has completed several continuing educational programs such as the Project Management Certificate, Black Belt in Six Sigma, and Top Teams.
Most of Sean's 19 year career has been dedicated to projects. About 2 years of this experience was in manufacturing plants where he has worked on process improvement and capital projects. The remainder of the career has been in New Product Development, where he has held a variety of design, leadership and project management roles. Most recently, Sean lead an international team of more than 100 people who completed a very complex 3 year new product development project. Beyond this, Sean's work experience provides students with practical insights that allow him to make adjustments to accommodate New Product Development projects which inherently have a lot of uncertainty and rework. Sean is also a licensed professional engineer in the state of Wisconsin.  Pam Starcher is a Customer Project/Program Manager for Hewlett-Packard. She is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with 25 years of experience in the Information Technology industry with a strong emphasis on project management and implementation, business management, and people development.
In her role at H-P, she is responsible for managing the software development teams for two of the company’s service offerings in the insurance industry. She’s been with the company for 10 years. Prior to H-P, Pam was employed for 15 years at Trane Company as a software engineer and project manager. Project industry experience includes order processing, warranty services, pricing, inventory management, property and casualty insurance, flood insurance and Department of Defense audits. Pam holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Management Information Services from Viterbo University, and an Associate of Applied Science in Data Processing from Western Wisconsin Technical College. She served on the board of the La Crosse PMI chapter for 5 years, 2 years as president, and remains an active member of the chapter.  Debbie Roch is an experienced coach, teacher and leader. She has been employed by EDS, an HP company for 18 years. She is a results oriented leader with strong business, project management, and client relationship skills. She is experienced at driving account and business transformation. In her current role, as an Applications Services Leader, she is focused on Project and Program Delivery Excellence for a large Banking and Insurance client. Debbie has a strong technical background with significant applications development experience focused on project implementations. Her global experience ranges from client interface to requirements gathering in Turkey, system installations in Argentina and program management for a global client server deployment.
Debbie is a PMI certified Project Manager Professional (PMP) with a Bachelor’s degree in English from the College of William and Mary, a Masters degree in Rehabilitation Counseling from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Master's Certificate in Project Management from George Washington University. She has designed and delivered a variety of seminars to allow individuals to reach their highest potential both in the public and private sectors. She works with Program and Project Managers to help them enhance their leadership and delivery skills. She taught a PMP Exam Prep workshop to assist PMs in her organization prepare for and pass their exam. She is a natural change coach who seeks to blend her counseling, training and leadership experience to assist leaders and peers embrace positive change to direct their own personal and professional growth.  Rich Maltzman, PMP, who has developed PMP®-exam preparation courseware, including practice exams, books, and audio programs and consults, also develops, and delivers courseware for commercial and academic enterprises. Mr. Maltzman has an engineering background with a BSEE from the University of Massachusetts, an MSIE from Purdue University, a mini-MBA from Wharton and a Master's Certificate in international business management granted jointly from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business and INSEAD of France.
Mr. Maltzman received his Project Management Professional certification (PMP) in 2000 after earning the Stevens Institute's Master's Certificate in 1999. Exclaim!'s mission is to assist and inform organizations and individuals about Project Management, using the framework provided by the Project Management Institute yet based on the hands-on experience of running real projects, managing real project managers, and training of thousands of real people on real PM. Maltzman has presented papers on project management at conferences in The Netherlands, Mexico City and many US locations. Mr. Maltzman is a distributor for Successful Projects and the owner of Exclaim!, a Project Management Training and Consulting firm Jan Vasile is a Sr. Project Manager with IDEXX Computer Systems, a division of IDEXX Laboratories. At IDEXX, Jan is responsible for project management of the new product development process for their flagship software product releases. She is a Certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and former Fulbright Scholar, with broad senior level business leadership experience, especially knowledgeable in business process development and improvement. Jan has managed strategic cross-functional business projects across diverse service and manufacturing industries, in the internal as well as outsourcing arenas. Her breadth of experience ranges from the technical to senior corporate business management, including areas such as telecommunications, corporate training and documentation, marketing and telemarketing, technical customer support, call center operations, website technical self-service, and IT software development. Jan is a proven motivational team builder, and a positive and supportive mentor. She clearly knows how to combine business process & technology to deliver quality solutions to the end-customer.  Gary Scherling has 30 years of experience in a variety of challenging senior roles in Project Management, Business Models and Process Management. With a solid background in mainframe operations, and successfully delivering numerous IT and business projects in both the public and private sectors.
Throughout his career, Gary has focused on training and mentoring staff, peers and students in ITIL, Project Management and PMOs, His Project Management experience includes developing and implementing PM methodologies; managing PMOs for both product portfolios, branch programs, and within large projects; and delivering projects, from project initiation to closeout. He is both a Project Management Professional, a Prince2 practitioner, and proceeding towards P3O certification.  Brian Hinton, PMP, is the Director of Successful Projects Northland and is a project management instructor. Currently located in Rochester, MN, his 13+ years of experience in Project Management has been with IBM managing server development and compliance projects. Brian is also a Registered Professional Engineer (PE) with an Electrical Engineering focus. He is a dedicated leader, dynamic project manager, and a patented engineer who enjoys volunteering his project management skills on the La Crosse Chapter PMI Board of Directors and is currently serving as the 2010-11 Chapter President. He has also been an instructor for Rochester Community Education since 2005. To round his experience, he has attained the level of Distinguished Toastmaster and now enjoys teaching others how to reach their educational, communication and leadership goals.
 Gary Mundinger recently retired from Trane (an Ingersoll Rand owned company) as their Manager of Learning and Development. He spent 27 years in developing and delivering leadership level programs to various leaders globally and 4 years as a production leader in the La Crosse, Wisconsin, manufacturing location.
Gary has been certified to deliver various training programs to include: Development Dimensions International’s various leadership modules; Kepner-Tregoe’s Project Management program; Center for Creative Leadership’s Benchmark 360 assessment instrument; Dana Gaines Robinson’s Performance Consulting process and many other programs that were internally developed by himself and others for Ingersoll Rand/Trane leaders. In addition, Gary is a retired Lieutenant Colonel from the Wisconsin Army National Guard and held several leadership positions in that organization to include platoon leader, company commander, assistant commandant for the Wisconsin Military Academy, and operations officer for an engineer battalion. He is a graduate of the Wisconsin Military Academy’s Officer Candidate School and the Army’s Command and General Staff College. Gary graduated from the University of Wisconsin Stout with a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Education. He taught at La Crosse Central High School for 4 ½ years prior to his employment with Trane. |