Month: April 2026

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, […]