Volunteering Spotlight: Let's Meet Ken Loewen

Ken Loewen is an analytics and business intelligence leader with over 20 years of experience delivering data-driven insights across technology, professional services, and global enterprise environments. He holds the PMP and multiple finance and analytics credentials, including the Certified Professional Managing in AI (PMI-CPMAI). Over the last several years, Ken has led and delivered BI initiatives centered on Power BI, SQL, Azure data platforms, and enterprise reporting modernization. I'm currently in a career transition seeking opportunities in analytics, business intelligence, or data-driven transformation leadership.

Which project management certifications do you hold?
PMP, PMI-CPMAI

Which volunteer team do you currently support?
PMI Portland Chapter Board of Directors. I'm in my second year, serving as Vice President of Finance and my fifth year on our board.

What impact does your volunteer team have on the project management profession?
My team exercises financial oversight of chapter operations, ensures transparency of financial plans and results, and ensures monetary resources are available to equip the chapter volunteers to deliver our full span of services to our members.

How does your volunteer experience benefit your day-to-day job as a project professional?
My volunteer experience provides opportunities to network with others in furtherance of my career transition and allows me to exercise my finance and analytics skills, purposefully delivering the chapter's routine financial operations.

Which M.O.R.E. principle do you apply most in your work and how does it influence your approach to delivering project success?
Most often, I apply Manage Perceptions in my work as a project practitioner. PMI's recent findings regarding the importance of clearly defined project success criteria resonate strongly with my experience. For much of the last two decades, I’ve been in roles where I am formally responsible for establishing, aligning, and communicating success measures across executive sponsors, delivery teams, and functional stakeholders.

My analytical skillset equips me to identify effective measures of project success, but managing perceptions goes far beyond defining KPIs. It requires ensuring that stakeholders share a common understanding of what those measures mean, why they matter, and how progress will be interpreted. I strive to proactively engage stakeholders early to clarify whether success is defined by scope delivery, business value realization, risk mitigation, adoption, or longer-term strategic positioning. In many cases, misalignment among the stakeholder group at the outset is the single greatest risk to perceived failure, even when execution is strong. A significant challenge in that engagement and clarification process is avoiding the perception of "being picky" when driving for clarity and precision.

I also recognize that perception is shaped by communication cadence, transparency, and narrative. My roles have often called for me to translate complex project data into executive-ready insights, contextualizing performance against agreed-upon criteria and framing trade-offs in business terms. When constraints shift - as they inevitably do - I focus on resetting expectations in a structured, data-informed manner so stakeholders understand not just what is changing, but why.

Is there a ProjectManagement.com article or webinar you've found helpful recently?
I really enjoyed Cracking the Code of Project Success: Beyond the Triple Constraint by Antonio Nieto.

Where can others connect with you?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kloewen

If you are a current PMI volunteer and would like to share your story, please fill out this form and our team will reach out to you soon!