Hello Reader, Quick one: I'm speaking at a BrightWork webinar next Tuesday and wanted to invite you along. It's called Stop Automating Project Management Chaos: Why AI rewards organisations that already have their house in order, and it's about something I keep seeing play out: businesses put money into AI tools expecting better visibility and decision-making, but if the underlying project data is fragmented, reporting is inconsistent and governance is weak, AI doesn't fix that... it just...
9 days ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, You might have heard that the PMP exam is changing later this week. And if you've already got your PMP certification or have zero plans to do it, you might wonder why that is news. Honestly, it's not really, because unless you are mid-way through your exam prep this change won't affect you in any day-to-day way. However, it is interesting to see how PMI thinks the work that project managers do is changing. Questions across the PMP certification domains will be split like this...
16 days ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, Everyone in our world is talking about AI productivity gains. The numbers being thrown around are bold: 10x faster, 10x more output, 10x the capacity. The research I’ve seen suggests real-world productivity gains from AI are often more modest than the headline numbers. So when Creatio named their major platform release the “10x Release”, I wanted to see what they actually mean by it. That’s one of the reasons I’m tuning in to Creatio’s 10x Release event on July 15. Creatio is...
22 days ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, I get messages fairly regularly from people who are part-way through the Google Project Management Certificate and have started wondering whether it's actually going to lead anywhere. Which is a very reasonable thing to wonder, and I'd rather give you an honest answer than a cheerful one. The short version is that it can genuinely open doors, particularly if you're moving into project management from another field or you're in the early stages of your career and need something...
30 days ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, One of the things nobody really prepares you for in project management is how isolating it can be, not in a dramatic way, just in the ordinary day-to-day sense of having problems you can't fully articulate to your team, questions you can't ask your stakeholders, and situations where the textbook answer is technically correct but completely useless in the actual context you're dealing with. Most project managers don't have a peer group. You might have colleagues, but they're busy...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, Most project managers don’t actually manage “their” team. We manage people who report to someone else. Welcome to matrix life! If you’ve ever tried to: Negotiate resource availability Handle conflicting priorities Run a meeting that doesn’t derail Get alignment without formal authority …you know the plan is only half the job. Most of what I seem to spend my days doing is negotiating, trying to get the right people to show up, slotting my work around other people's priorities...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, I've been asked more than once by project managers who are quietly worried about it: what do you do when your RAG status doesn’t tell the full story? The traffic light is green. Technically everything is on track. And yet you have this nagging feeling that something’s not quite right, a dependency that’s wobbling, a sponsor who’s gone quiet, a team that’s delivering but only just, and they're not as proactive as they used to be. RAG is a simple tool for a complicated job, and...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, Let’s talk about your schedule. Is it: A) Calm, realistic and under controlB) Optimistic but technically possibleC) Held together with hope and conditional formatting No judgement. (At least, not much!) Scheduling is one of those core PM skills that looks simple… until you’re actually doing it. I’ve pulled together my best articles on project scheduling into one place, from estimating and building timelines through to managing slippage and dealing with reality when it hits....
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader, So you’ve just started a new project, and you’re not sure what you’re supposed to create. Do you need a project charter? Or will a Terms of Reference (ToR) do the job? The challenge is that neither document has a single universal definition, so if you join a new company and find they use ToRs instead of Charters, then it can be hard to know what they are actually looking for as part of project governance. And don’t get me started on how Project Initiation Documents fit in! Let’s...
2 months ago • 1 min read