Warning Signs – Leading Answers

April 26, 2025September 30, 2025Agile Project Management, Planning, Tailoring Approaches, Warning Signs

Hold Your Horses: PREPARE for Responsible AI Use in Project Management

Artificial intelligence promises to revolutionize project management; it can assist with data analysis, automate routine tasks, and predict project trends. However, as a veteran project manager (read “slightly skeptical older person”), I am concerned AI will cause a tsunami of project failures before improving the state of the practice. People tend to be lazy, and a fool with a tool is still a fool. Worse yet, a fool with a tool that produces well-written, convincing project deliverables is a very dangerous fool. Attempting to Solve the Wrong ProblemProducing project charters faster (or communications plans, risk management plans, etc.) is not the right goal. Project management does not have a typing speed problem. Unfortunately, AI vendors and people looking to implement […]

March 28, 2024October 3, 2026Agile Project Management, Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Teams, Warning Signs

People Problems: Dealing with Dark Triad Traits

Most of us will experience challenging and downright toxic people at some point in our careers. If you ever have, then you can probably see, in retrospect, how much those individuals differed from ordinary people. Yet, at the time, their impacts may have seemed so upsetting and jarring that it is quite common to question whether we had it wrong or contributed in some way toward the situation. So, having some strategies for dealing with these people can save your sanity and provide pathways through the issues while also protecting others. Fortunately, truly toxic people are few and far between. Most people we deal with are generally helpful or at least neutral. Occasionally, we encounter people with challenging personalities: people […]

April 14, 2023September 27, 2025Agile Project Management, Books, Exceptions, Leadership, Planning, Risk Management, Tailoring Approaches, Theory of Constraints, Warning Signs

Definition of Broken (DoB): A Tool for Improving Communications and Outcomes

Communicating project issues is challenging. Exactly when should we escalate? Who to, and how much of a chance to correct things should be given first? This is why some projects create control limits around critical parameters and develop escalation plans to communicate exceptions and agree on the next steps. However, on most small to medium size projects, these escalation plans are often missing or left to the project manager's discretion. This creates further problems if the response is too late, not far-reaching enough, or not aligned with sponsor expectations. Also, what are the expectations for communicating delays, risks and issues at the team level? Do we want to hear when something takes a couple of hours longer than planned (probably […]

May 8, 2022October 3, 2026Agile Project Management, Books, Certification, Tailoring Approaches, Visual Learning, Warning Signs

Agile Adoption – Left to Right is the Way to Go

Agile approaches "Crossed the Chasm" a decade ago. The organizations we see adopting it today are in the "Late Majority" and "Laggard" categories of Geoffrey Moore's Technology Adoption Life Cycle. As companies adopt agile because they have to / it's now expected / the industry norm / required to stay competitive / <insert your own reason>, we see more push-back and failures than ever. Doing something because you have to, rather than because you want to, leads to shortcuts and the wrong mindset. The image below, from Ahmed Sidky, shows agile as a mindset. In the image above, agile is a mindset described by four values, defined by twelve principles and manifested through an unlimited number of practices. The correct […]

April 16, 2022September 27, 2025Agile Project Management, Events, Tailoring Approaches, Warning Signs

Hybrid Agile Discussion

Upcoming Presentation: “Hybrid Agile, Stepping Stone or Quicksand?” How do you feel about hybrid agile – mixing agile approaches with non-agile approaches? Can it be useful sometimes, or is it the path to compromise and failure? (A great way to separate agile purists from pragmatists is to ask them what they think about hybrid agile.) Please join me on April 26 to discuss hybrid agile with PMI San Diego Chapter. In this session, we will separate agile blends from non-agile hybrids. Then explore case studies of failures and success stories, examining patterns of problems and success factors. Topics include: Left-to-right agile adoption vs right-to-left implementation The Genius of the “And” vs. the Tyranny of the “Or” Hybrid models (switchover, sandwich, […]

August 29, 2020Agile Project Management, Events, Leadership, Remote Work, Teams, Warning Signs

The Perfect Storm for The Project Economy

The winds of change were strong before the COVID-19 pandemic. Driven by three macroeconomic trends, the need for projects and project managers was increasing. These three trends are: 1) Accelerating rates of technology adoption 2) The switch to alternative energy sources to maintain GDP and meet emissions targets 3) Infrastructure projects for population growth. These movements occurring together were spawning an explosion of projects to turn ideas into reality. This increase in project demand was christened The Project Economy by PMI in 2019. To be fair, these trends and strategies for handling them had already existed for more than a decade. Globalization and business transformation have been discussed extensively. Eric Ries documented his lean startup methodology in 2008 as a way for […]

July 2, 2020Agile Project Management, Events, Leadership, Personal Agility, Remote Work, Tailoring Approaches, Teams, Warning Signs

Returning to the (Electronic) Cottage

This is not a post about rich people now able to visit their second homes after the lockdown, instead, a revisit of the concepts of decentralized work being the new way of undertaking projects. In 1980, Alvin Toffler’s book The Third Wave introduced the idea of “The Electronic Cottage” as the modern workplace where information technology allows more people to work from home or wherever they want. Toffler was a futurist and businessman who did not get the attention he deserved. Even though Accenture identified him as one of the most influential voices in business leaders (along with Bill Gates and Peter Drucker), we do not hear much about him.

June 21, 2019November 3, 2025Agile Project Management, Leadership, Personal Agility, Planning, Retrospectives, Tailoring Approaches, Teams, Warning Signs

Innovation: Running Experiments and Learning

In my last article on Incubating Innovation, we explored the culture and mindset of accountable experimentation. This article focuses on actionable tools and approaches. Within agile frameworks, the team retrospective is the primary workshop for planning and evaluating experiments. Yet most team retrospectives I see are broken. Teams spend too much time recording viewpoints and information—but not enough time reviewing or planning experiments. It is common to see the majority of the time spent gathering what went well, what did not go well, and appreciations. Yet where’s the focus on experiments, the learning process and trials for the next iteration? To make things worse, some teams do not take the retrospective seriously. Maybe after the potential stress of the sprint review, […]

January 1, 2019Agile Project Management, Events, Leadership, Personal Agility, Travel, Warning Signs, Weblogs

Focusing on Results, Not Agile Approaches

Quarter Century 2019 marks the 25 year anniversary of Scrum and DSDM. I was involved in the creation of DSDM in 1994 and was an early adopter of Scrum and FDD shortly afterward. Now, having been at this for a quarter of a century I am reflecting on where my journey has taken me compared to others. I am agnostic about agile. I value the mindset and goals more than approaches that preach a single path. This has had mixed blessings for me. I remain agnostic and impartial, but I have not jumped on any of the approach bandwagons.

July 20, 2018April 14, 2026Books, Leadership, Tailoring Approaches, Teams, Warning Signs

AI Assistants for Project Managers

Predictions like “AI will take our jobs” sound scary. However, long before our jobs as project managers are taken, AI will help us. In fact, it already is, and we don’t think about it much. While writing this article, AI in Microsoft Word and the add-in Grammarly helped protect you from the bulk of my spelling and grammar mistakes. This is how AI will help us first, by doing small things we are error-prone with, before tackling larger tasks. Like me, do you spend time booking meetings, finding rooms, and distributing information? Do you analyze backlogs and scope outlines for potential risks, or review estimates for commonly missed activities? Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help with these tasks and many more. […]