Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
What's It to You?
Mark Mullaly is president of Interthink Consulting Incorporated, an organizational development and change firm specializing in the creation of effective organizational project management solutions. Since 1990, it has worked with companies throughout North America to develop, enhance and implement effective project management tools, processes, structures and capabilities. Mark was most recently co-lead investigator of the Value of Project Management research project sponsored by PMI. You can read more of his writing at markmullaly.com.
Project management isn't something you order from a parts catalog, or a manifesto you sign. But what is it? We need to stop trying to graft the latest trend onto our situations, and get on with the messy, time-consuming work of figuring out the answer for each of us.
For all that has been written about project management — all the books, papers, magazines and web sites — we still don’t seem to get it — "it" being an understanding of what project management is, how it works and why it makes sense to do it. Generally speaking, most people — clients, sponsors, team members and in several notable instances the project managers themselves — don’t have a clear picture of what good project management looks like and why it works the way it does. And we don’t recognize bad project management for what it is and deal with it accordingly.
Project management is more than just timesheets, status reports and the occasional rah-rah speech delivered with a slice of pizza before the next all-nighter. Team members shouldn’t accept it, sponsors shouldn’t condone it and the project managers shouldn’t do it. Yet many organizations have come to accept a strange limbo where there is enough perception of value that we keep managing that way even in the face of general frustration about not totally getting what we want …
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"If you work on a lobster boat, sneaking up behind people and pinching them is probably a joke that gets old real fast." - Jack Handey |