Articles By This Author
What a PM Can Hand Upward Two Weeks Before a Leadership Review
“I’ve got the project review with the leadership team in two weeks. Put something together for me.” Your boss says it in passing, between one meeting and the next. The PM goes back to their desk, opens the last status report, attaches the schedule and sends twenty-four slides. Two weeks later the boss gets five […]
Taking Over a Project Mid-Flight: The Questions to Ask Before Touching the Plan
“It’s all in the documentation.” The previous project manager says it sincerely, shakes your hand, and from Monday is on another team. Three weeks later the client asks about a report they were apparently due to get by the end of the month. The documentation doesn’t mention it. The promise was made on a phone […]
Red-Teaming Your Own Project Plan Before Someone Else Does
“And what happens if the supplier is a month late?” The question comes up at the steering committee, from a director who is seeing the plan for the first time. The PM starts answering and halfway through the sentence realises there is no answer. For the next ten minutes the room watches a plan the […]
“I Thought That Was Your Job”: Where Responsibility Quietly Falls Through
“I thought you were preparing the test data.” “And I thought you were, it’s your system after all.” It’s Tuesday, testing was supposed to start on Monday, and two people are looking at each other with genuine surprise. Neither of them is lying. Each has been certain for three weeks that this one sat on […]
How Many People Are Actually in Your Project, and Who Talks to the Client?
“That’s not what your developer told me.” The client says it calmly, without any complaint, and in that same second the PM understands that the project has a communication channel they didn’t know about. The developer did nothing wrong. The client asked directly, so the developer answered. Most teams have a communication structure, it’s just […]
Good Decision, Bad Outcome: Why Project Reviews Punish the Wrong Thing
“Who decided to go with that supplier?” In a review of a project that ended badly, this question is one of the first to be asked. Someone raises a hand or looks down, and from that moment the conversation is about the person, not about the decision. Meanwhile the decision may have been a good […]
Green on the Dashboard, Red in the Hallway
“The dashboard is all green, so where is this escalation coming from?” That question usually comes from a sponsor who opened the dashboard in the morning and heard from the client in the afternoon that the rollout is stuck. Both pieces of information are true. The dashboard really was green and the rollout really was […]
The Last Time Something Fell Through the Cracks: Who Caught It, and How
“I thought that went out last week.” That’s how the conversation about a lost item usually starts. The contract never reached the client, the new person’s access was never set up, the fix didn’t make it into the release. Nobody blocked it and nobody forgot on purpose. At some point it simply stopped belonging to […]
Every Project Runs a Different Way, Depending on Who Runs It
“So where do you record decisions here?” That’s the question a developer asks after moving on Monday from one project to another in the same company. In the old project, decisions landed in a note after every meeting. In the new one, nobody can give him an answer, because decisions live in email threads, on […]
Zero-Based PMO: What Happens When You Stop Optimizing and Start Over
“We send this report because we’ve always sent it.” That is the honest answer to the question of why roughly half of what the PMO asks of project managers exists at all. Nobody says it out loud, but every PM who has filled in the same template in three versions for three audiences knows that […]