Today we explore agentic pipelines, loops and recursive self improvement (RSI) via our old friends, PMP Questions. This is article 4 in my AI agents series. Start here for an introduction, see here for an explanation of what constitutes a real agent, and here for a discussion of how I use them and running AI locally. This article gets into how to plan and manage agent work; that’s what “agent orchestration” means. As a project manager, I suspect you already have the thinking skills required. You already know why one person can’t do everything on a project. You staff a project with specialists, engage each of them in the correct piece of scope, and put reviews between the stages that […]

This is the third article in the “Leading A Team that’s Part Machine” series. You can read the introduction here and the second article about what constitutes a true agent here. In this article, I will cover the work I assigned to my agents, their costs and my decision to explore local AI. Work-wise, my goals for a team of agents fell into two categories: The first was personal, the second commercial. Personal: Learn about AI by spinning up my own team of agents, doing real work and seeing how it impacts project management Managing my to-do items across my full-time job, side projects and writing calendar Task automation to reduce the time I spend on admin and other repetitive […]

My Why My trial of agentic AI started as an experiment. A proof-of-concept I would explore, maybe write about, and then stop. It turned into the most fun and stimulating, but also scary and frustrating experience I have had with IT for decades. Not since I learned code in the 1980’s have I been so excited about a technology. It has rekindled my love for IT and got me really excited about the next chapter of management: Managing hybrid teams that consist of: People People using AI to be more productive Autonomous agent team members I did not retire my prototype; instead, I bought dedicated hardware for it and have gone deep. However, that story is for later articles. For […]

Within two years, many project managers will be leading teams that are part-human and part-machine. I have spent the last few months running one of these teams, and the reality has been far more mundane than the headlines, much closer to ordinary team management than to science fiction. This is the first article in a series about what I found when I built and led a working team of autonomous AI agents. The teams we manage are about to change shape, and not in some distant decade but within the next two years. They will be made up of three kinds of workers: People People augmented by AI Pure AI agents that do real work without anyone prompting them Most […]

Mary Parker Follett’s ideas underpinned my book “Beyond Agile” that linked the people side of productivity to the mechanics of value delivery. In my mind, she is the true forgotten hero of project management, regardless of which industry you work in. Enid Mumford and James Martin are heroes in the IT and product space, but Mary Parker Follett was a true heavy-hitter, spanning all types of project management. Her ideas were skipped over when the easier-to-explain concepts of Frederick Winslow Taylor became codified as project management theory. Early editions of the PMBOK Guide and PRINCE2 focused on the math, logic and procedural elements of Taylor’s project planning and scheduling. Later, PM frameworks tried to retrofit the importance of motivation, emotional […]

The Bond Villain Who Shaped Software Development: I once tried to reach James Martin when I was a young project manager. Getting a response from someone who now lived on his own private tropical island seemed like contacting a Bond villain and required a certain persistence. Martin was world-famous within his domain and nearly invisible outside it, and his island life only sharpened the impression of someone operating on his own terms. He wrote more than 100 books on technology and computing. He predicted the internet in 1978. He gave Oxford the largest single donation in the university’s 900-year history. He coined Rapid Application Development (RAD) and helped lay the foundations for what we now call agile. If you work […]

PM Heroes: Series Introduction Sometimes we are unaware of who influences our thinking. An approach makes sense, a framework fits, and years later, it is hard to say exactly where the idea came from or who first explained it clearly. This post is the first in a series that profiles the people whose thinking shaped mine most deeply. Some of them you will recognize. Most of them you probably will not, and that is exactly why this series exists. Enid Mumford: Why She’s On My List Let me tell you about someone who changed how I think about project work, and who most people in our industry have never heard of. In 1993 I was working at Data Sciences Ltd, […]

Anyone planning to take the PMP exam in 2026 is invited to the pilot exam in January. You get a 20% discount on the exam fee and a free retry when the exam launches in July if not successful. The trade-off is having to take the exam in person rather than online, and waiting until March for your results. I am a proponent of adding AI and sustainability to the exam and believe these are critical skills for today’s project manager. So, I am offering a free study group in January for people registered for the pilot. It offers: One month’s free access to PMIllustrated full website with exam simulator, games, video and full ECO coverage Three 1-hour Zoom sessions […]

Confidently Wrong – Post 2 In the first post about my Global Summit session “Confidently Wrong: Avoiding GenAI Pitfalls with SME-First Thinking” we summarized how GenAI works and how its training influences the results returned. It focused on how Large Language Models (LLMs) are pattern matchers that return likely and plausible results, but do not truly understand project management. LLMs have been trained on vast datasets which make them great for suggesting project artifact templates, but usually poor at filling in the details for your unique project. Also, due to their training materials, they tend to suggest summarized content of popular ideas, unless specifically forced to think deeper and broader. Finally, while their outputs look plausible, we always need a […]

Global Summit 2025 – Post 1 I had a great time last week at Global Summit. I did a presentation on using AI to augment team and SME knowledge rather than replace it. I co-presented on the evolution of the PMBOK Guide and agile integration from the 3rd to the 8th edition with Jonathan Lee and a guest appearance by Jesse Fewell. I also got to attend some great sessions and hang out with Agile Alliance board members (Bob Hartman, CP Richardson, Songbac Toh) at the Agile Arcade booth during breaks and lunches. This year, the sessions were not recorded, so I will highlight some of my points in a series of posts here. My talk was called “Confidently Wrong: […]