About This Blog

Hello! Welcome to my blog, and thank you for taking the time to read some of my thoughts, ideas and advice. Hopefully, you will find it good advice! My name is Mark. I’m a UK-based project manager. You can read more about me and my background on the About page of this website.

Why another project management blog?

That is an excellent question.

There are many excellent project management blogs written by expert project managers with more authority and a better understanding of project methodology.

And I am not an expert.

However, I have years of experience delivering projects in various sectors in diverse commercial environments. I’ve had project successes and painful failures. I’ve managed small £20k projects and projects with multi-million-pound budgets. I’ve worked in traditional waterfall environments, in agile teams and more commonly in settings that have smashed together waterfall and agile into a bespoke methodology.

Main areas to be explored

Simplicity

Many settings I’ve worked in were bureaucratic, with many “quality” gates, approval processes and committees and a mass of documentation and logs to keep updated. Despite all these processes, projects are still not delivering their goals and the value the customers expect. The projects are overshooting budgets and repeatedly missing milestone dates. In most organisations, the answer to these issues is more controls, more senior management oversight, more governance documents, and more approval gates.

More controls and processes are not the answer. In fact, the opposite is the right way forward. Fewer controls and processes to free the project manager of this unnecessary bureaucracy. This allows the project manager to interact and influence the team and stakeholders rather than fill in spreadsheets. This lets the project manager focus, manage, and report on key metrics that influence the project outcomes.

“Wagile” environments

Increasingly, organisations have implemented agile techniques and adapted them for their use case. Frequently, this is a mix of agile and waterfall, called wagile.

These types of hybrid project governance environments are becoming increasingly common. They may even be becoming the norm. They are individual to the project organisations with process and team adaptions. Sometimes, with little or no formal documentation, they rely on tacit knowledge.

I will explore these hybrid environments and strategies to manage projects because the traditional project management methodologies, like PMI, Prince2 and AMP, do not address how to deliver projects in these mixed methodology environments. These certificated led methods assume you are all in waterfall or agile. My experience is that this is rarely the case. Hybrid approaches are the majority methodology.

While managing projects using mixed governance approaches, I’ve worked out what worked for my teams and me and, more importantly, what didn’t. These environments can be fuzzy and complicated to deliver projects in. Roles are unclear, processes need to be clarified and tools to use need to be defined.

I will explore and discuss these areas of unclearness and uncertainty in this blog. By sharing my experiences and learnings, I can help other project managers better manage in these hybrid environments. I hope to fill some of the gaps left by the formal certificate methodologies. I will bring real-life practical advice to an area many project managers struggle with, including me.

Other subjects that will be covered

I will talk about using manual and online tools, including my use of AI.

I will also cover the personal skills, tools, and strategies a project manager needs in modern project management settings where you are often asked to manage several projects simultaneously.

Finally, I will include other off-topic discussions with links to project management. These will likely include my experiences operating a small IT consultancy and how sports, particularly running, is an excellent analogy for project management and leadership. Lastly, I will examine personal productivity approaches that I have found helpful.

This will be a varied bag but always linking back to managing projects. If there are subjects you would like covered, please reach out.

I hope you enjoy it.