Category: Project Management or PM Insights
-
The PMBOK Guide went from 49 processes to 40. Here is how they fit together, and the 11 I would never skip.
-
The work is finished. But is it what we agreed to deliver? Development is complete. Testing passed. Everything meets the documented requirements. Then comes the stakeholder review. “This isn’t exactly what I expected.” Suddenly, a project that looked ready for acceptance has a new problem. Was something missed? Did the requirements change? Or did the…
-
A colleague recently asked an interesting question: if AI helps developers complete work faster, should we change how we estimate story points? It’s worth exploring, especially now that AI is moving beyond coding assistance. Developers can work with multiple AI agents that generate code, run tests, correct failures, and repeat the process, sometimes autonomously while…
-
Most project teams have some version of lessons learned. Sometimes it is a formal retrospective. Sometimes it is a project closeout meeting. Sometimes it is simply a conversation about what worked, what didn’t, and what should be done differently next time. The intention is good. The problem is that identifying a lesson and actually learning…
-
Your team works in two-week sprints. You have a Product Owner, a Scrum Master, daily standups, sprint planning, reviews, and retrospectives. Everything is tracked in Jira. So your team is Agile. Right? Not necessarily. Following Agile practices doesn’t automatically make a team Agile. And a fixed release date, an approved budget, or formal governance doesn’t…
-
-
Most people treat “program manager” as “project manager, but bigger.” Same skills, more projects, wider title. But the distinction matters. A program can struggle even when every project inside it looks healthy on paper. The View from the Project Seat A project manager’s job is depth on one thing. Scope, schedule, budget, risk, for their…
-
Most people treat “program manager” as “project manager, but bigger.” Same skills, more projects, wider title. That’s wrong, and it’s why programs quietly fail even when every project inside them looks healthy on paper. The View From the Project Seat A project manager’s job is depth on one thing. Scope, schedule, budget, risk, for their…
-
At some point in every project manager’s career, the workload grows faster than expected. One project becomes three. Three become five. This week, mine hit seven. Before long, you’re balancing multiple schedules, competing priorities, different stakeholders, unexpected risks, and a calendar that seems permanently full. The natural reaction is to work longer hours. But that’s…
-
Everyone is asking what AI should do for project managers. I think we’re asking the wrong question. The real question isn’t whether AI can make decisions. It’s whether we still know which decisions belong to us. Someone asked me this week: “How do you decide what to hand off to AI versus what you keep…