Voices on Project Management

by Peter Tarhanidis, Ph.D.

Today’s hybrid work environments, ethical demands, stakeholder complexity, and organizational pace require new success criteria. According to PMI’s 2024 Pulse of the Profession report, only 34% of projects are considered successful by traditional measures of scope, time and cost. For leaders to thrive in this new reality, project guardrails must be modernized to inspire autonomy while aligning purpose, ethics, and sustainable outcomes.

Rethinking Guardrails: From Control to Catalysis
Traditional project governance structures emphasize compliance, change control, and rigid escalation paths. But in environments characterized by complexity, ambiguity, and constant change, rigid control can undermine innovation and engagement.

McKinsey & Co.’s research shows that projects with adaptive governance outperform peers by 25% in delivery of value and 30% in stakeholder satisfaction. Leaders must introduce guardrails that promote empowered decision-making within clearly communicated boundaries, and encourage distributed leadership and agility without sacrificing accountability.

5 New Guardrails for Today’s Project Leaders

1. Value Over Output: PMI’s 2023 Global Megatrends shows organizations that prioritize value over delivery metrics achieve a 42% higher rate of strategic goals. Teams that connect features to customer outcomes develop deeper alignment with mission and increase stakeholder confidence. These leaders define value-centric KPIs rather than milestone attainment.
2. Ethics Over Expediency: Edelman’s 2024 Trust Barometer indicates 71% of employees expect their companies to take a public stand on ethical issues, expect their leaders to anticipate unintended consequences, and apply ethical analysis into key decisions. Ethically governed projects report 30% fewer incidents of rework and stakeholder backlash (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2023). Empowered teams build a culture of integrity and long-term resilience. These leaders add ethical risk as part of project risk registers, ethical checklists and stakeholder impact maps.
3. Psychological Safety Over Hierarchical Control: Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson shares teams with high psychological safety are 27% more effective in cross-functional collaboration while enabling openness, faster error detection, and greater innovation. Projects with psychologically safe environments complete 18% faster and report 35% greater team engagement (Google’s Project Aristotle). Team members are more likely to raise early red flags and offer solutions without fear of reprisal. These leaders model curiosity, not criticism. Shifting to questions such as “What can we learn?” versus “Who’s accountable?”
4. Agility Over Certainty: Only 16% of organizations report that traditional planning methods are effective in today’s fast-paced environment (PMI, 2024). Agile projects are 2.5 times more likely to succeed than waterfall counterparts in dynamic sectors like tech, finance and healthcare (Standish Group CHAOS Report, 2023). Teams working in short feedback loops are more responsive to customer needs and regulatory changes, resulting in better user adoption. These leaders use rolling-wave planning and commit to decision-making during sprint steering reviews.
5. Stakeholder Integration Over Stakeholder Management: The modern stakeholder is no longer a passive recipient but an active participant. Projects that actively engage stakeholders experience 29% fewer change requests and 41% greater satisfaction scores (IBM Business Value Institute, 2023). When stakeholders are engaged early, then resistance turns into advocacy. These leaders manage stakeholders by listening and integrating their inputs. Use stakeholder empathy interviews and involve them in prototype testing or solution design.

Making Guardrails Operational
Putting these principles into action requires a shift in mindset and structure. Here are five ways to support your practice:

1. Formalize guardrails. Document in project charters and playbooks the team norms, governance models, and onboarding practices.
2. Measure guardrails. Use KPIs like Net Promoter Score, stakeholder sentiment, innovation speed, and compliance metrics.
3. Empower coaches and champions. Appoint internal coaches or culture champions to reinforce these behaviors during stand-ups, reviews, and retrospectives.
4. Build guardrails into decision trees. Create frameworks where teams can operate with autonomy while escalating only when critical guardrails are approached.
5. Conduct quarterly guardrail health checks. Conduct quarterly “guardrail health checks” to audit, reflect and adapt. Use team surveys and external facilitators to refine policies and culture.

Conclusion
Now more than ever, project success requires leaders who can lead with precision and principle. This requires one to balance execution with empathy, speed with substance, and strategy with stewardship. The new project guardrails of value, ethics, safety, agility and integration do not constrain; rather they are cultural enablers that empower high-performance delivery within purpose-driven boundaries. These guardrails provide structure for leaders where trust replaces control, adaptability replaces rigidity, and purpose becomes the new metric of success.

What actions will you take to ensure guardrails turn from control to catalysis?

References

1. Pulse of the Profession: The Future of Project Work, PMI (2024)
2. Unlocking the Power of Agile Governance, McKinsey & Company (2023)
3. Creating a Culture of Psychological Safety, Harvard Business Review (2023)
4. CHAOS Report: Project Success Rates, Standish Group (2023)
5. The Stakeholder Experience Advantage; IBM Business Value Institute (2023)
6. Trust Barometer: Expectations of Ethical Leadership, Edelman (2024)
7. Ethical Decision-Making in Fast-Paced Projects, MIT Sloan (2023)

By Peter Tarhanidis, Ph.D.

Many leaders accept failure as part of their learning to enhance their future and mature outcomes. At the beginning of a new year, we must reflect on the past year’s successes and failures. Reflecting on project failures in 2024 offers leaders valuable insights to foster success in 2025. Understanding these challenges, supported by data and examples, is crucial for leaders aiming to enhance project outcomes in 2025.

Here are some notable quotes and perspectives on failure and resilience:

• Failure as the stepping stone to success: "Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly." — Robert F. Kennedy.
• The power of perseverance: "The secret of life is to fall seven times and to get up eight times." — Paulo Coelho
• The need to take risks: "Risk is not to be evaluated in terms of the probability of success but by the value of the goal." — Ralph D. Winter

Leaders should reflect on 2024 project failures with a focus on identifying root causes, assessing systemic issues, and implementing actionable lessons. Below are examples of challenges organizations and leaders faced or continue to struggle with:

1. Poor resource management: Inefficient allocation of resources led to project delays and budget overruns. TeamStage’s 2024 survey cites 60% of respondents identified poor resource management as their biggest challenge. Prosymmetry illustrates this impact; the Denver International Airport's automated baggage handling system faced severe delays and budget overruns due to inadequate resource allocation and management.
2. Lack of defined project management methodologies: The absence of standardized processes resulted in inconsistent project outcomes. Plaky’s 2024 survey indicates that 42% of project managers do not follow a defined project management methodology, making their projects 15% less likely to meet goals and stay within budget. Prosymmetry 2024 shares an example of when the Ford Edsel project failed due to the absence of a clear project management methodology, resulting in misaligned objectives and market misjudgment.
3. Unrealistic deadlines: Setting unattainable timelines leads to compromised quality and team burnout. Tempo 2024 states that 31% of project managers reported unrealistic deadlines as a top challenge. A key highlight noted by the Project Management blog is when the FBI's Virtual Case File project was abandoned after four years and $170 million spent, primarily due to setting unattainable deadlines that led to incomplete and faulty deliverables.
4. Insufficient budget: Unsurprisingly, underfunded projects struggled to procure necessary resources, affecting deliverables. Exploding Topics 2024 survey notes that 17% of project managers cited insufficient budget as a significant challenge. ProjectManager blog cites the California DMV's IT modernization project was canceled after $135 million was spent over nine years, largely due to chronic underfunding and budget mismanagement.
5. Poor project quality: Without the voice of the customer, deliverables failed to meet stakeholder expectations, necessitating costly revisions. This was noted by the Exploding Topics 2024 survey by 13% of project managers, who identified poor project quality as a major issue. ProjectManager blog notes the Healthcare.gov website launch in 2013 suffered from numerous glitches and downtime due to inadequate testing and quality assurance, leading to a poor user experience.

2025 Strategies to Ensure Success

1. Implement defined project management methodologies: Adopt a standardized framework like agile or waterfall to provide clear guidelines and improve project outcomes. Tempo 2024 confirms projects are 15% more likely to meet goals and stay within budget when following a defined methodology.
2. Set realistic deadlines: Engage stakeholders in setting achievable timelines based on resource availability and project scope. Leaders will reduce the risk of team burnout and maintain quality standards.
3. Ensure adequate budget allocation: Conduct thorough cost estimations during the planning phase to secure necessary funding. Leaders can prevent resource shortages and maintain project momentum.
4. Enhance project quality: Implement quality assurance processes and continuous improvement practices. Organizations can deliver products that meet or exceed stakeholder expectations, reducing rework.
5. Invest in resource management tools: Utilize project management software to optimize resource allocation and track progress. This will aid leaders in improving efficiency and in meeting project objectives.

By addressing these challenges with targeted strategies, leaders can build project maturity and drive more successful outcomes in 2025. What project challenges did you have in 2024, and what actions will you take to ensure success in 2025?

References

1. https://teamstage.io/project-management-statistics
2. https://www.prosymmetry.com/blog/4-famous-project-management-failures-and-what-to-learn-from-them
3. https://www.tempo.io/blog/failed-projects
4. https://plaky.com/learn/project-management/project-management-statistics
5. https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/failed-projects
6. https://explodingtopics.com/blog/project-management-stats

by Lynda Bourne

In my last post, Information Is Subjective, I outlined the way data is gathered and transformed into information by the subjective application of personal knowledge. Now, let’s look at how knowledge is created and shared (the gold connections in the diagram above).

People know things: Knowledge is organic, adaptive and created. It exists in the minds of people. Some of each person’s knowledge is explicit—they can explain the rules that apply to it. But much is tacit: intuition, gut feelings and other ill-defined but invaluable insights, grounded in the person’s experience.

Therefore, managing knowledge means managing people.

The fact that knowledge exists in people’s minds does not preclude joint activities to create knowledge, share knowledge and refine knowledge. But the people involved need to be in communication with each other.

Some of the structured ways this can be accomplished include:

• Various forms of meetings. People working together to debate or brainstorm a challenge and build on each other’s inputs often enhances creativity.
• Mentoring and coaching to help transfer tacit and explicit knowledge from the coach or mentor to the trainee or mentee.

Structured approaches work well if the information that needs to be transferred or created is understood, and the people involved focus on creating or acquiring the required new knowledge.

Less formal approaches are better for generating completely new information or insights that people did not know they were about to create.

Spontaneity and serendipity are encouraged through social interactions, such as:

• Communities of practice where people with a common interest interact. Good communities draw members from a diverse range of workplaces, backgrounds and knowledge levels.
• Member associations such as PMI.
• Other social networks and the activity of networking by an individual.
• Creating an organizational culture of open communication that allows and encourages both the asking of questions and the provision of advice. People cannot know what they don’t know and a small piece of friendly advice at an opportune moment can prevent a painful learning experience.

Knowledge will never be uniform in its distribution or in the way people interpret what they know. The function of a creative knowledge management system is to smooth out the differences as much as is practical and to facilitate the creation of new knowledge through the synthesis of different people’s ideas and insights.

So as you venture forth to share knowledge, remember:

• An effective knowledge management system is built on a symbiotic relationship between an effective information management system and a culture that encourages and facilitates the open exchange of knowledge and ideas between people.
• An information system on its own will at best simply make useful information available to people. There is no control over how, or if, the information is accessed or used appropriately.
• A knowledge management system on its own may create brilliant insights, but the information is organic and transient. Everything is in people’s minds and their knowledge leaves the room when they do.
• A knowledge management system is most effective when it combines these two elements and provides governance and oversight to extract the maximum value from the information held within the organization through personal interaction, conversation and other social processes. 

by Lynda Bourne

Knowledge is organic, adaptive and created—it exists in the minds of people. A person’s store of knowledge is built from their life experiences, their observations, and their formal and informal learning. Consequently, what one person knows will be different to what everyone else knows. Some of each person’s knowledge is explicit, meaning they can explain the rules that apply to it. But much is implicit: intuition, gut feelings and other ill-defined but invaluable insights grounded in the person’s experience.

Information is recorded, held in systems and made accessible to people. Good information management systems contain verified information in a useful format. This information is based on data. Because it is written, it is consistent—but it may not be correct. How the data is interpreted to create the information depends on people’s knowledge and perceptions.

Data Is the Starting Point

Data is a set of observations or measurements. If nothing changes in the world, another person can perform the same measurement or observation at another time and gather the same set of data. Data may not be accurate or reliable but it is based on observed facts about something. The potential for error rests in the way the observations or measurements were made.

The Interpretation of Information

Information is organized data. It provides the answer to a question of some kind or resolves an uncertainty.

However, transforming data into information is not automatic; it requires the input of knowledge. Someone has to look at the data and observe patterns that indicate something of significance or make decisions on what is important in a particular context. Information is refined data in a context that is designed to communicate a message to the receiver of the information.

The problem is different people with different knowledge frameworks will interpret the same set of data in different ways. You only need to listen to politicians arguing about the state of the economy to see how different the interpretation of the same set of data can become. The old adage applies, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”

When I reduce my knowledge to a codified or written format it becomes available to others as information. But I have no way of knowing how you or anyone else will use or change the information I have created.

Information Management Systems

Changing data into information is the first application of knowledge in an information management system. And the journey from data to useful information may need several passes through the information management system. PMI’s A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) identifies:

• Work performance data (gathered by someone during the course of doing project work)
• Work performance information (the data processes by discipline experts into basic information)
• Work performance reports (the basic information, selected, compiled and placed in context to be used by stakeholders).

At each step in this flow, a person applies their tacit and explicit knowledge to the information they have received. They then codify their new knowledge to create another piece of information ready for use by others. The problem with this process in isolation is it is asynchronous and based on individual transactions. This is suboptimal and potentially dangerous. 

However, the model of the information management system above is very common and spans global systems, such as Wikipedia down to simple knowledge repositories in project web portals. What’s missing in this type of system is the knowledge management element, which we will look at next time.

An information system on its own will at best simply make useful information available to people. There is no control over how, or if, the information is accessed or used appropriately. In a full knowledge management system, information is the bridge between data and knowledge:

• The raw data represents values attributed to parameters of something.
• Knowledge signifies understanding of real things or abstract concepts.

More on this next time.