Bio:

Tricia Diamond, PhD, PMP, PMI-ACP, PMO-CP, author of Second Line Leadership, is the Founder and Principal Consultant of Diamond PMO Consultants, a Washington State OMWBE consulting firm based in Seattle. Her practice spans PMO development, portfolio and program management, Agile frameworks, regulatory affairs, governance, sustainability and environmental equity, professional and workforce development, and grant compliance.

Over a career of more than 20 years across government, aerospace, aviation, and technology, Dr. Diamond has led some of the most demanding public sector programs in the country. As ARPA Implementation PMO Director for the City of New Orleans, she developed an enterprise PMO. At King County, she managed complex capital and infrastructure programs for King County International Airport and the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention, earning the King County Distinguished Service Award in 2022.

Dr. Diamond holds graduate degrees in aerospace engineering and Educational Administration and undergraduate degrees in English, Mathematics, and Aerospace Engineering. Her certifications include PfMP, CPMAI, CPSS, GPM-B, PMI-ACP, PMO-CP, Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert, AWS AI Practitioner, Certified Agile Leadership, and ITIL Foundation. She served as VP of Professional Development and Programs for the 3,200 plus member PMI Puget Sound Chapter, where she organized Professional Development Day 2025 at The Westin Seattle and secured a City of Seattle Mayoral Proclamation recognizing the chapter. She is a former Seattle Human Rights Commissioner, serving as Co-chair, and currently serves the city as a Seattle Parks and Recreation Commissioner.

She is also a New Orleans music and dance history culture bearer, the daughter of the late Billy Diamond, the Solid Senders bandleader mentored and sponsored by Louis Armstrong and Oscar Celestine who discovered and named Antoine “Fats” Domino and played bass on his foundational first songs.  He managed Domino and later the 5-4 Ballroom in Los Angeles and is permanently memorialized at the Dew Drop Inn alongside Little Richard, Etta James, and James Brown.  Her family also includes foundational rock and roll guitarist Ernest McLean, Shirley Goodman of Shirley & Lee, violinist Charles Veal Jr., and John Porter, bassist for Papa Celestin’s Original Tuxedo Orchestra. She also speaks on five centuries of her family’s history in New Orleans and three continents (Europe, North America and Africa).

A dual US and Dutch citizen fluent in English, Dutch, Diamond speaks internationally on PMO and portfolio leadership, business analysis,  governance and accountability, agile and adaptive teams, and sustainability.  Her recent stages span three continents, from the PAM Summit in Krakow, Poland, to national conferences such as Agile 2026 across the United States and Africa.

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Execution and Project Delivery

The Execution Gap: Why Everyone Is Busy and Nothing Ships

Most organizations have a completion problem instead of strategic misalignment. Attendees will get the portfolio discipline senior leaders use to determine what gets resourced, killed, protected and can use the moves they learn on Monday morning. This session is non-technical and built for audiences that range from CEO and COO to the brand new analyst starting their career

Saying No Is a Leadership Skill: Prioritization for Overcommitted Teams

Every organization has more good ideas than capacity. Teams will learn to score, sequence, and decline work without political damage, using a scaled down version of the portfolio triage model I used on nine figure portfolios. Attendees leave with a completed prioritization board for their own department.

From Second Line to Agile: New Orleans Traditions as a Blueprint for Adaptive Leadership

How do you keep a large group moving in one direction while giving every person room to improvise? New Orleans second line parades solved that generations before Scrum or SAFe existed, coordinating hundreds of people in real time with no backlog and no micromanagement. The session translates that into practical adaptive coordination for teams working under real complexity. Delivered at PMI Agile 2026 in the Agility at Scale track. The workshop version includes a movement activation and small group breakout, and the keynote version ends instead runs without the small breakout but can end with a second line to celebrate the learning.

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Portfolio and Governance

Strategy Without Delivery Is Fantasy: Portfolio-Level Business Analysis

The most valuable question at the portfolio level is whether a product, project or program should be built developed at all and if it serves the strategy and meanwhile organizations focus on delivery. Covers dependency blindness across initiatives, the benefits register that separates a real portfolio practice from a project queue, and how leaders keep strategy connected to delivery. Delivered at the PAM Summit in Kraków for PMI Poland, to project managers, business analysts, and business owners.

From Chaos to Compliance: Governing a $386 Million Portfolio Under Pressure

Managing federal recovery funds under dual oversight while the political ground shifted underneath. Audiences get the governance structure that held, the early warning signals that prevented findings, and an honest account of what nearly went wrong. Regulated industries tend to recognize themselves in this one immediately.

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Leadership Keynote

Grit and Grace: Leading in Rooms That Were Not Built for You

A career built across two continents, an engineering doctorate, a nine figure portfolio, and the quiet resistance that came with each of them. A keynote about competence that gets questioned, resilience that’s never performative, and how women build authority in environments that keep asking them to prove it. Warm, funny, and direct rather than heavy.

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Available on Request:

When AI Gets It Wrong and Nobody Notices (Breakout)

With my background in engineering and sustainability, sorry but this isn’t an AI hype session. I’m a practitioner who holds AWS and Azure credentials and has deployed automation inside a regulated portfolio through what these tools genuinely accelerate, the environmental and equity costs, how they quietly break, and the audit questions that catch a bad decision before an examiner does. Offered as a supporting session rather than a headline.