The Priority Gap: When the PMO and the Board Aren’t Solving the Same Problem
There’s a kind of project that doesn’t fail with a bang. Nobody shuts it down and nobody announces a failure. It just gets a little less every month: less time at the steering committee, fewer people, less of the sponsor’s attention. The PM does everything by the book, reports go out on time, risks are […]
Can You Send an AI-Written Status Update to Your Sponsor?
The short answer is yes, you can, but not all of it, and not without reading it as if someone else had written it, because in a sense that’s exactly what happened. The longer answer starts with the moment I first got a finished draft of a sponsor update from a machine. It was correct, […]
Nobody Remembers What Was Agreed a Week After the Standup
You know the scene. Wednesday, the daily standup, and someone on the team says: “OK, I’ll reach out to legal about that contract.” Everyone nods, topic closed, we move on. The following Wednesday someone asks what happened with the contract. Silence, and then the sentence I’ve heard on every project I’ve ever run: “I thought […]
Scope Creep Doesn’t Arrive as a Decision. It Arrives as a Sentence.
No project I’ve ever run grew because of a decision. Nobody ever called a meeting and said: “we’re expanding scope by three weeks of work, do you accept?” If it had happened that way, we’d probably have said no, or at least priced it, and had the conversation about scope versus value that a change […]
The Meeting That Writes Its Own Action List (and Why PMs Still Don’t Trust It)
For a while now, most of my meetings have had an extra attendee. It says nothing, promises nothing, and an hour later sends everyone a summary with a list of tasks, owners, and deadlines. Clean, fast, no typos. Exactly what a well-run project meeting is supposed to leave behind. The first weeks with a tool […]
Status, Consequence, Options, Recommendation: The Only Structure a Sponsor Update Needs
For my first years of running projects, I sent sponsors lists. What’s done, what’s in progress, what’s running late. Carefully, every week, color-coded, and every week I got the same reply: “thanks, got it.” Nothing more, or no reply at all. For a long time I took that as a good sign. Only when one […]
The Premortem: Naming What Could Kill Your Project Before It Starts
A 45-minute workshop format for saying out loud, before kickoff, exactly how the project could fail.
Your Client’s ‘Done’ Is Not Your Team’s ‘Done’
Definition-of-done conflicts get worse, not better, once a client and a delivery team are speaking across a contract.
The Silent Two Weeks: What ‘On Track’ Status Reports Are Hiding
A field guide to the status reports that say green for weeks right before a project turns red.
The Hero Developer Syndrome: Is Your Best Coder Your Biggest Threat?
Is your best developer a single point of failure? Learn to manage the hero developer syndrome, reduce your bus factor, and prevent knowledge hoarding.