Lynn A. Keeys

Lynn A. Keeys, having worked, lived or traveled in numerous countries, is a global thinker and practitioner with a multiregional perspective. She is an adjunct professor of Project Management for Competitive Advantage at SKEMA Business School in Paris, a member of the PMI Academic Insight Team, a visiting research fellow at WU Vienna and an immediate past president of the PMI South Africa Chapter. A Project Management Professional (PMP)® certification holder and PMI member since 2005, Dr. Keeys is passionate about project management’s strategic and innovative nature, and its contribution to sustainable development, professional capacity growth and service provision to members and stakeholders through a global perspective that is rooted in the local context to achieve positive organizational and societal impact. She holds doctoral, master’s and bachelor’s degrees as well as master’s certificates. 

Dr. Keeys is a “prac-academic” with three decades of both practitioner and academic experience. As CEO, she led the PMI South Africa Chapter through a transformative innovation process in 2020, aimed at providing access to all members through cluster engagement, digitalization and new value propositions for members, academic institutions, youth, government, corporations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The chapter awarded her for achievements in diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) efforts. A former United States diplomat with the US Agency for International Development, she worked in portfolio, program, project management (PPPM), project design and development, strategy, and organizational leadership in the international/sustainable development field, successfully leading multidisciplinary, multicultural, and multisectoral teams.

She is an experienced speaker and author on project management, strategy, value creation and sustainability. She has presented at project management research and practitioner conferences, including the European Academy of Management, International Research Network on Organizing by Projects and the PMI Africa Conference. She has spoken on Africa’s contribution to the project management knowledge ecology, sustainable development and the use of project management to enable indigenous communities to access open innovation for local value creation and empowerment. She is a guest editor for project management journal collections, is a reviewer and serves on the editorial board of the “International Journal of Project Management.”