I Stopped Writing About Project Management for a Decade. Here’s What Changed — and What Didn’t.

It has been a while.

The last post on this blog went up in 2012. I remember writing it, roughly. I was running my own consultancy, delivering projects across Greater Manchester, genuinely busy. And then the writing stopped — not with any announcement, not with a plan to return, just the gradual drift of someone who had more projects than hours.

Since then, I have been working. A lot. Manchester City Council, Rochdale Borough Council, NHS bodies across Greater Manchester. Projects that went well and projects that didn’t, turnarounds that worked and a few that were already too far gone when I arrived. I managed a major Microsoft 365 migration across 8,000 council staff in the middle of a pandemic. I wrote a lot of project governance documents and sat in a lot of governance meetings, and learned which ones actually mattered and which were just governance theatre.

And now I’m back. So: why? And what’s changed?

What’s changed

The obvious thing is AI. When I stopped writing, Siri had just launched and the big AI conversation was whether your phone could understand your accent. Now every project management tool vendor has bolted “AI-powered” onto their product description. I was in a demo recently and watched an AI generate a complete business case, risk register, and benefit map in about forty seconds. It was impressive and terrifying in equal measure – I’ll come back to that in a later article.

Remote and hybrid working has changed the texture of delivery, though perhaps less than people expected. The fundamentals remain the same, but the informal channels that used to carry a lot of project communication – the conversation in the corridor, the ten minutes before a meeting starts – are harder to replicate. Teams that were good at communication stayed good; teams that were already struggling found it harder.

Agile is now just… how things are done, at least in principle. In 2012 it was still a methodology people chose. Now it’s a word that means everything and nothing depending on who’s saying it. I’ve sat in “agile” delivery programmes that had more bureaucracy than any PRINCE2 project I’ve run. The name changed; the underlying habits sometimes didn’t.

What hasn’t changed

Governance still matters, and still gets ignored until things are going wrong. I have walked into troubled projects in 2024 where the issues were identical to the ones I was seeing in 2008 – a sponsor who isn’t engaged, a risk register that hasn’t been updated in six months, a team that has stopped pushing back on unrealistic timelines. The tools are different; the failure modes are not.

Stakeholders still lie about deadlines. Not maliciously, usually – they’re optimistic, or they’re under pressure, or they genuinely believe the previous three delays won’t happen again. Part of a project manager’s job has always been translating “we’ll have it done by Friday” into a probability distribution and managing upwards accordingly.

The gap between PM theory and PM practice is still enormous. The methodology guides tell you how things should work. The reality of delivering inside a council, or an NHS trust, or a large private sector organisation involves politics, history, personalities, and constraints that no framework fully accounts for. That gap is, honestly, most of why I started writing in the first place.

Why I’m writing again

Two reasons.

First, the AI thing. The project management world is filling up with content that is either uncritical cheerleading for AI tools or reflexive dismissal of them. I have a specific, grounded view on what AI can and can’t do for project delivery – one that comes from actually using it rather than writing about it theoretically. I want to put that view somewhere.

Second, I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years, and I have accumulated a lot of opinions. About governance. About risk. About what makes the difference between a project that delivers and one that doesn’t. Some of those opinions are probably wrong, but they’re grounded in actual delivery, not just reading other people’s frameworks.

So: the blog is back. It will cover the fundamentals – the things about project management that haven’t changed and won’t – alongside whatever the industry is currently getting wrong. There will be some AI content, some governance content, some public sector content, and probably some pieces that just need to be written.

If you’re new to project management, there’s a backlog of older posts that cover the basics – most of it still holds up. If you’re experienced and looking for a practitioner’s perspective rather than a vendor’s pitch, that’s what this is.

Welcome back. Or welcome, if this is your first time here.