When Ownership Meets Governance
 Designing Governable Professional Agency for Project Success Organizations increasingly expect Project Professionals to do more than deliver outputs. They are expected to understand strategic intent, anticipate consequences, challenge assumptions, reassess viability, influence stakeholders, surface uncomfortable evidence and remain focused on whether the project is actually creating value. That evolution is understandable. Projects do not succeed because schedules are maintained, reports are produced or deliverables are completed in isolation. Outcomes emerge from interactions among strategy, sponsorship, investment decisions, governance, organizational capabilities, operations, customers, suppliers, technology and the project itself. Project Professionals therefore need sufficient agency to operate within that wider system. But this creates a governance problem: What happens when professional agency expands faster than organizational authority? A Project Professional may identify that assumptions underlying the business case are no longer defensible. The professional may challenge them, escalate the evidence and recommend that the project be redirected, paused or terminated. Yet the authority to make that decision may remain with a Sponsor, steering committee, investment body, executive or another governance authority. If the recommendation is rejected and the project subsequently fails, who owns the outcome? The answer cannot be derived from the language of ownership alone. It requires an architecture of governance. The deeper question is: If Project Professionals are expected to exercise greater agency over success, what governance architecture must organizations provide so that challenge, escalation, recommendation and dissent can be exercised without converting distributed organizational failure into individualized professional accountability? This takes us beyond empowerment and into the architecture of Governable Professional Agency. 1. Project Outcomes Are Systemically Produced A first mistake is to treat project success as if it were produced by a single actor. A Project Professional may influence planning, integration, communication, risk responses, stakeholder engagement, delivery coordination and decision preparation. But other actors may control strategic priorities, investment approval, business-case ownership, benefit ownership, resource allocation, organizational capacity, product decisions, operational adoption, commercial commitments, supplier relationships, policy and regulatory decisions, and continuation or termination of investment. This is not a new governance problem. Earlier project-governance literature had already located important forms of authority and accountability outside the Project Manager. Material published through PMI in 2005, explicitly discussing the APM's 2004 Directing Change guidance, described project sponsorship as the critical link between senior executives and project management. Sponsors were associated with formal authority and decisions, ownership and maintenance of the business case, timely project closure, benefits accountability, and the use of independent advice in project appraisal. Later PMI-published research similarly emphasized that project success or failure is not entirely within the control of the Project Manager and project team, and situated sponsorship at the intersection between corporate governance and the governance of projects and programs. The contemporary issue is therefore not the discovery that project outcomes are distributed. It is what follows when professional expectations of agency expand within that already distributed governance architecture. Even an exceptionally capable Project Professional operates within a wider causal system. This distinction matters because: Influence over an outcome is not equivalent to control over all the conditions producing that outcome. Project success is often jointly produced. Authority is distributed. Knowledge is distributed. Causal influence is distributed. Accountability must therefore be designed with that distribution in mind. Otherwise, the organization risks converting a systemic outcome into an individualized judgment. 2. Greater Agency Does Not Automatically Create Greater Authority Organizations frequently encourage professionals to behave as owners. Take initiative. Challenge assumptions. Think strategically. Focus on outcomes. Speak up. Escalate early. Own success. These expectations can be valuable. But behavioral expectations do not, by themselves, alter organizational decision rights. A professional can be expected to think beyond the boundaries of the project without acquiring authority beyond those boundaries. Three concepts must therefore remain distinct. Professional Agency The legitimate capacity and expectation to interpret evidence, exercise judgment, challenge assumptions, influence decisions and act within one's professional remit. Decision Authority The legitimate organizational right to make a particular decision. Outcome Accountability The extent to which an actor may legitimately be held answerable for producing, protecting or failing to produce an outcome. These concepts interact, but they are not interchangeable. Agency is not authority. Influence is not a decision right. A recommendation is not a decision. Responsibility for exercising professional judgment does not automatically create accountability for every outcome that follows. This is where governance becomes essential. 3. From Empowerment to Governable Professional Agency Empowerment is often discussed as if it were primarily cultural. Organizations encourage people to speak up, take initiative and behave with greater ownership. But empowerment without institutional architecture can become rhetorical. A more useful question is: Empowered to do what? The relevant governance questions are concrete. What information can the professional access? What assumptions can be challenged? What matters can be escalated? What recommendations can be formally submitted? Who must consider them? Who decides? Within what timeframe? How are material decisions recorded? What happens to accountability when professional advice is rejected? These questions lead to a more precise concept. Governable Professional Agency Professional agency is governable when the organization provides sufficient access to relevant information, legitimate rights to challenge and escalate, explicit authority boundaries, traceable decision pathways and accountability proportionate to the actor's actual authority, decision rights, discretion, causal influence, access to relevant knowledge, and reasonable opportunity or duty to act. This does not require giving Project Professionals unlimited authority. It requires making the relationship among agency, authority and accountability explicit and governable. 4. The Five Rights of Governable Professional Agency If organizations genuinely expect Project Professionals to exercise broader agency over success, five corresponding governance rights become particularly important. These are proposed here as an analytical architecture, not as universal legal entitlements, nor as a claim that every organization must implement them identically. 4.1 The Right to Know Professional judgment depends on access to relevant evidence. A Project Professional cannot meaningfully reassess viability while being denied material information about the assumptions on which viability depends. Depending on context, relevant information may include business-case assumptions, strategic objectives, benefits expectations, major dependencies, financial constraints, risk exposure, supplier performance, organizational readiness and material changes affecting continued justification. The principle is not unrestricted access. It is: Decision-relevant access proportionate to the responsibility being assigned. An organization cannot reasonably demand informed ownership while structurally withholding information necessary for informed judgment. 4.2 The Right to Challenge Information alone is insufficient. Professionals must be able to question assumptions, commitments, forecasts and decisions when evidence provides legitimate grounds for doing so. This may include unrealistic targets, obsolete assumptions, unsubstantiated benefit expectations, unmanageable dependencies, continued viability, risk acceptance or strategic premises that no longer correspond to reality. Challenge is not necessarily insubordination. Within a properly governed system, evidence-based challenge can be one mechanism through which the organization protects decision quality. A system that asks professionals to exercise judgment but rewards only agreement does not create meaningful agency. It creates compliance. 4.3 The Right to Escalate Some issues cannot be resolved within the professional's authority. They must move to the actor or body possessing the relevant decision right. The distinction itself has clear antecedents. PMI-published guidance on project sponsorship has described the Sponsor as an escalation point for decisions and issues beyond the Project Manager's authority and associated sponsorship with go/no-go decisions. But an escalation mechanism is meaningful only if it leads somewhere. An organization may formally permit escalation while providing no corresponding obligation for anyone to consider the issue or make a decision. The professional raises the issue. The issue is acknowledged. No decision is made. Funding continues. Delivery continues. The underlying exposure remains. Procedurally, escalation occurred. Substantively, governance may not have. Therefore: An escalation right without a corresponding obligation to consider and, where a decision is required, decide may provide procedural voice without substantive governance effect. Effective escalation requires an identifiable decision authority, an appropriate decision window and a mechanism for preserving the resulting decision path. 4.4 The Right to Recommend Project Professionals must be able to translate professional judgment into explicit recommendations. Depending on circumstances, those recommendations might include continuing, modifying, rebaselining, redirecting, pausing or terminating an initiative. But the distinction remains fundamental: The right to recommend is not the right to decide. The professional remains responsible for the quality, integrity and timeliness of the recommendation. The legitimate decision authority remains responsible for the decision it is empowered to make. Governance becomes distorted when those two forms of responsibility are retrospectively collapsed. 4.5 The Right to Recorded Dissent This may be the most consequential of the five. Suppose a Project Professional concludes, on defensible evidence, that a project should no longer continue. The recommendation is formally presented. The legitimate authority decides otherwise. The concerns later materialize and the project fails. What does the organizational record show? A mature governance system should be capable of establishing what was known, when it became known, what assumptions were challenged, what was recommended, on what evidence, who possessed the relevant decision authority, what decision was made and why. This is not an argument for defensive bureaucracy. It is an argument for accountability integrity. Without contemporaneous decision evidence, organizations risk reconstructing failure retrospectively around the most visible delivery actor rather than around the actual distribution of knowledge, authority and decisions that produced the outcome. 5. Rights Require Corresponding Organizational Obligations Governable Professional Agency cannot rest on professional rights alone. It requires reciprocal organizational obligations. The organization must provide access where informed judgment requires access, a legitimate forum where evidence-based challenge can be considered, an identifiable escalation path where authority lies elsewhere, clarity over who possesses the relevant decision right, and sufficient traceability where material recommendations or decisions may subsequently affect accountability. The architecture can therefore be expressed as: Access → Challenge → Escalation → Recommendation → Decision → Record → Accountability This is not merely a communication process. It is an authority and accountability architecture. 6. The Termination Test One question can expose much of this architecture: Can a Project Professional legitimately recommend that the organization stop the project? Not rhetorically. Operationally. The importance of project termination is itself well established historically. The 2005 governance paper published through PMI noted the tendency for projects to continue after circumstances suggested they should close and argued that Sponsors should reconsider whether continuation remained justified. The Termination Test proposed here is different. It does not ask merely whether projects are terminated appropriately. It tests the governance pathway through which professional judgment encounters formal authority. Suppose evidence indicates that continued investment may no longer be justified. Can the professional obtain the information necessary to test that conclusion? Can the underlying assumptions be challenged? Can the issue be escalated beyond the immediate reporting relationship? Can termination be formally recommended? Who possesses stop authority? Is the appropriate authority required to consider the recommendation? Is there an appropriate decision window? Is the decision and its rationale traceable? Can the professional raise the issue without inappropriate retaliation? If the recommendation is rejected, does responsibility for the continuation decision remain with the authority that made it? And if the project later fails, can the organization accurately reconstruct the decision path? If several of these conditions are absent, the organization may be asking for outcome ownership without providing the governance architecture necessary to exercise that ownership meaningfully. 7. The Empowerment Reality Test The Termination Test exposes an extreme case. A broader question applies to everyday governance. Empowerment Reality Test When an organization claims to empower Project Professionals, which decisions can they make, which decisions can they formally challenge, which can they escalate, which can they only recommend, and which remain explicitly outside their authority? A Project Professional may, for example, have authority to modify sequencing but not scope, allocate resources within an agreed envelope but not increase investment, recommend changes in benefits expectations but not redefine strategic objectives, or escalate viability concerns without possessing authority to terminate funding. None of these limitations is inherently problematic. The problem arises when: Accountability ignores them. Empowerment becomes meaningful when the boundaries of discretion are sufficiently clear for both action and accountability. 8. The Capacity to Absorb Dissent Is a Governance Capability Organizations often celebrate candor in principle while making dissent costly in practice. This matters particularly in projects because projects accumulate commitment. Money has been invested. Executives may have sponsored the initiative. Targets may have been announced. Contracts may have been signed. Teams have mobilized. Reputations may become attached to continuation. Under these conditions, evidence that challenges the prevailing narrative can become organizationally uncomfortable. Yet this may be precisely when professional agency matters most. A Project Professional who identifies material evidence against continued viability may have a professional responsibility to make that evidence visible. The organization must therefore distinguish between unsupported resistance and evidence-based dissent. A governance system that demands ownership of success while penalizing legitimate evidence-based dissent creates an internally contradictory professional expectation. It asks the professional to help protect the outcome while discouraging behavior that may be necessary to protect it. 9. Rejected Advice Changes the Accountability Question When a professional recommendation is rejected, the professional's responsibility does not disappear. The professional may remain accountable for whether relevant evidence was identified, whether the analysis was competent, whether material uncertainty was communicated, whether escalation occurred appropriately, whether recommendations were timely and whether actions within the professional's authority were properly executed. But another actor or governance body may remain accountable for the decision that it possessed the authority to make. This produces an important principle: Accountability should be traceable to the actual architecture of decisions, responsibilities, relevant omissions and opportunities to act, not merely to the visibility of the actors closest to delivery. That does not mean every failure can be allocated neatly to one person. Many project outcomes are genuinely systemic. Nor is the objective to find a different individual to blame. The objective is to preserve the distinction between contribution to an outcome and legitimate accountability for decisions, actions and relevant omissions within one's responsibility and authority. 10. Retrospective Concentration of Accountability Project failure creates hindsight risk. Once the outcome is known, earlier uncertainty can appear smaller than it actually was. Warnings may look more obvious, alternative decisions more inevitable, and distributed choices more easily compressed into a simplified narrative. The Project Professional may also be one of the most visible continuous actors associated with the initiative. A systemically produced outcome can therefore be retrospectively narrated as the success or failure of one professional. Decision traceability is an important safeguard against this distortion. Its purpose is not to eliminate accountability. It is to make accountability more faithful to the actual distribution of knowledge, authority, responsibilities, decisions and actions at the time they occurred. 11. PMOs, Sponsors and Governance Bodies Governable Professional Agency is not created by Project Professionals alone. Sponsors, PMOs, steering bodies, portfolio authorities and other governance actors may all contribute, depending on the organizational model. Historical and contemporary project-governance literature already assigns consequential responsibilities to actors beyond the Project Manager. The important question is therefore not whether such actors exist, but whether their respective roles form a coherent architecture through which expanded professional agency can operate. Their precise responsibilities should not be assumed to be identical across organizations. What matters is that the governance system collectively provides the necessary functions: clarity of authority, access to decision-relevant information, legitimate escalation pathways, timely consideration of material issues, traceable decisions and accountability aligned with actual decision rights. A Sponsor with decision authority must be able to exercise it. A governance body must be capable of doing more than receiving information if consequential decisions fall within its remit. A PMO, where its mandate includes governance support, can help make authority boundaries, escalation paths and unresolved decisions visible. The allocation may vary. The architectural requirement does not. 12. From Heroic Ownership to Governable Agency There is an attractive simplicity in telling professionals: Own success. It encourages initiative. It discourages narrow role interpretation. It reminds professionals that completing deliverables is not the same as creating value. Those are useful effects. But organizations should resist converting that behavioral aspiration into an undifferentiated theory of organizational accountability. The alternative is not weaker professional agency. It is: Stronger agency embedded in stronger governance. Project Professionals should be expected to exercise judgment, challenge when evidence warrants it, escalate when necessary, recommend what the evidence supports, make material realities visible and act decisively within the authority they legitimately possess. Organizations must reciprocate by making the corresponding governance architecture real. That is not protection from responsibility. It is what makes responsibility governable and accountability legitimate. Conclusion: The Organization Must Also Own Its Part The debate about project success often asks whether Project Professionals are prepared to assume greater ownership. That question is incomplete. Organizations must also ask whether their governance systems are prepared for professionals who genuinely exercise it. A professional who reassesses viability may reach an inconvenient conclusion. A professional who expands perspective may expose consequences outside the project's immediate boundaries. A professional who manages perceptions responsibly may refuse to make an unhealthy project appear healthy. A professional who takes success seriously may recommend stopping work that powerful stakeholders want to continue. The real test of empowerment therefore comes after the professional speaks. The real test of empowerment is not whether professionals are encouraged to speak. It is what the organization is required to do when they do. Greater professional agency requires more than greater expectations. It requires governance capable of receiving challenge, processing dissent, locating authority, making decisions and preserving accountability boundaries. Organizations should not ask Project Professionals to own what they were never empowered to decide. Nor should professionals use limited authority to escape responsibility for what they could reasonably be expected to know, challenge, escalate, recommend or do. The objective is neither unlimited professional autonomy nor diluted accountability. It is coherence. What professionals are expected to know, what they are entitled to challenge, what they can recommend, what they are empowered to decide, and what they can legitimately be held accountable for must remain organizationally coherent. That is the foundation of Governable Professional Agency. And it may be one of the governance conditions required to make contemporary expectations of greater ownership of project success both meaningful and legitimate. References Hopkinson, M. (2005). Guidance for the Governance of Project Management. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2005, EMEA, Edinburgh, Scotland. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute. The paper explicitly discusses the Association for Project Management's 2004 Directing Change: A Guide to Governance of Project Management. Guidance for the Governance of Project Management, PMI Crawford, L., Cooke-Davies, T., Hobbs, J. B., Labuschagne, L., Remington, K., & Chen, P. (2008). Governance and Support in the Sponsoring of Projects and Programs. Project Management Journal, 39(3), S43-S55. Governance and Support in the Sponsoring of Projects and Programs, PMI Schibi, O., & Lee, C. (2015). Project Sponsorship: Senior Management's Role in the Successful Outcome of Projects. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2015, EMEA, London, England. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute. Project Sponsorship: Senior Management's Role in the Successful Outcome of Projects, PMI |
Posted on: August 25, 2026 07:41 AM
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Beyond Governance Who Governs the Governors?
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Posted on: August 24, 2026 05:02 AM
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The Project Manager in Adaptive Organizations: Why the Role Remains Essential
 In the previous articles, I sought to demonstrate that Project Management has evolved far beyond the discussion of methodologies. The discipline has progressively shifted from a dominant concern with planning and control to an increasing attention toward adaptation, outcomes, products, and context. We also saw that the capacity for change does not depend solely on teams, but on the organizational conditions that connect purpose, authority, resources, trust, and execution. This evolution leads to an inevitable question: If organizations are striving to become more adaptive and artificial intelligence is beginning to assume a growing share of the work traditionally associated with projects, is a Project Manager still necessary? Artificial intelligence systems can already support numerous activities in planning, analysis, documentation, monitoring, and decision preparation. Simultaneously, many organizations seek to distribute authority, increase team autonomy, reduce hierarchical dependencies, and accelerate response to change. Faced with this reality, it might appear that the profession risks losing relevance. That conclusion, however, confuses the tasks performed with the organizational function that gives them meaning. Producing schedules, organizing meetings, tracking activities, or consolidating information has never, in itself, constituted the reason for the Project Manager’s existence. Those activities are instruments. The decisive question is different: What organizational problem continues to exist even when a growing share of these activities can be automated? The organizational problem that justifies the profession One of the most relevant contributions of Project Management research has been to stop interpreting the project merely as a coordinated set of activities and to begin understanding it as a temporary organization. This conceptual shift helps distinguish the function of Project Management from other management functions. Organizations develop relatively permanent capabilities:
criteria. However, many strategic and cross-cutting changes do not belong exclusively to a single organizational unit. Developing a new product, executing a digital transformation, implementing artificial intelligence, building infrastructure, or adapting to a regulatory change typically requires the temporary orchestration of capabilities distributed across multiple areas and, frequently, external organizations. It is precisely to address this problem that the project emerges. The project does not necessarily replace the permanent organization, nor does it permanently reorganize all the capabilities upon which it depends. It creates a temporary collaborative configuration designed to combine knowledge, resources, decisions, and responsibilities around a specific change. This distinction remains relevant in functional, matrix, project-oriented, product-oriented, or network-organized structures. What varies is: The authority assigned to the project; The stability of the team; The availability of resources; The relationship with permanent units; How decisions are governed. The organizational problem, however, remains. It is necessary to transform distributed capabilities into temporarily coherent action, directed toward an outcome that no single unit fully controls. The distinctive function of Project Management resides in this space. Not all initiatives necessarily require a formal Project Manager role. In some contexts, these responsibilities may be distributed across a team, assumed by a product lead, a program manager, or another temporary leadership figure. This does not, however, eliminate the organizational function. It merely means that it can be exercised through different configurations. Whenever a change requires integrating distributed capabilities, managing temporary interdependencies, and preserving coherence across multiple units, that function must continue to be assured explicitly and legitimately. When a Project Manager is formally designated, they do not necessarily possess hierarchical authority over all people or resources involved. Nor do they replace the sponsor, governance bodies, functional managers, or product owners. They do, however, occupy a central, though shared, role in helping create and preserve the conditions necessary for the viability of the temporary organization. This means contributing so that:
Project Management remains necessary, therefore, not because specific instruments must continue to be operated manually, but because the problem of temporary cross-functional collaboration has not disappeared. The object of Project Management has also changed Recognizing the project as a temporary organization remains fundamental, but it is no longer sufficient to understand all contemporary forms of project work. Not all projects have become highly fluid or permanently reconfigurable systems. There are regulated, infrastructural, repetitive, or high-criticality initiatives that require relatively stable structures, requirements, and processes. However, in many contemporary contexts, the temporary organization can no longer be treated as a configuration fully defined at the outset and preserved without significant alterations until closure. Projects increasingly coexist with:
The challenge ceases to consist merely in managing changes to the plan. It comes to include ensuring that the collaboration configuration itself can change without fragmenting. Relationships can be revised. Roles can evolve. Boundaries between project, product, and operations can blur. Human and computational capabilities can be redistributed. New stakeholders can acquire influence over decisions initially assigned to others. For this reason, the object of Project Management has become more demanding. The Project Manager does not merely manage a temporary sequence of activities. They contribute to keeping a temporary organization viable - one that can learn, adapt, and reconfigure itself while seeking to materialize change. From execution management to preserving adaptive viability For decades, the Project Manager was associated primarily with execution management:
There is no sustainable adaptability without execution discipline. The evolution of the profession does not require abandoning these foundations. It requires recognizing that they no longer describe its full contribution. As the temporary organization becomes more distributed, interdependent, and adaptive, the challenge expands from execution management to preserving its adaptive viability. By adaptive viability, I mean the capacity of the temporary organization to remain coherent and executable - preserving decision rights, responsibilities, and legitimate conditions for action - while adjusting relationships, capabilities, and forms of collaboration in response to relevant changes. Preserving that viability does not mean assuming all decision rights or replacing governance bodies. The sponsor remains responsible for executive support and the strategic legitimacy of the initiative. Governance bodies remain responsible for decisions that exceed the authority granted to the project. Functional managers remain responsible for permanent capabilities, resources, and a significant portion of specialized knowledge. The Project Manager operates at the intersection of these responsibilities. They help make it visible when:
They contribute to making its governance operationally possible. This distinction avoids turning the Project Manager into an abstractly responsible entity for all change, while simultaneously recognizing the specificity of their position. It is at this point that I propose an integrative interpretation of the contemporary role of the Project Manager:
1. The adaptability of temporary organizations; 2. Boundary-spanning work; 3. Human-computational collaboration; 4. Organizational sensing. This is not to suggest that these responsibilities belong exclusively to the Project Manager. It is to recognize that, due to the cross-cutting nature of their function, they occupy a particularly relevant position to articulate them within the temporary initiative. Translating strategy to preserve context One of the most important manifestations of this contribution lies in the relationship between strategy and execution. As seen in the previous article, strategic intention can lose meaning as it cascades through the organization. Strategy transforms into objectives. Objectives transform into metrics. Metrics transform into tasks. Work continues to be executed, but the context that gave it meaning can degrade. This loss becomes especially problematic in adaptive environments. The greater the autonomy granted to teams, the greater the need for them to understand the intention that should guide their decisions. Autonomy without context does not necessarily produce coherent adaptation. It can produce locally rational decisions that are incompatible with the overall purpose of the initiative. Translating strategy is not an exclusive function of the Project Manager. Sponsors, functional leaders, product owners, and other stakeholders also participate in this translation. The specific contribution of the Project Manager stems from the continuity with which they accompany the transformation of that intention into cross-functional work. Whenever they relate an operational decision to a strategic outcome; Whenever they clarify the impact of a priority shift; Whenever they make explicit the assumptions supporting a choice; Whenever they identify a divergence between what is being executed and what the organization intends to achieve; They are contributing to preventing context from being lost as it crosses boundaries. Preserving context does not mean preventing the project from changing. It means ensuring that change remains understandable, justifiable, and tied to purpose. True strategy translation does not consist, therefore, in repeating plans or objectives. It consists in keeping available the meaning necessary for the temporary organization to adapt without losing direction. Facilitating decisions in an adaptive organization As the temporary organization evolves, decision complexity increases as well. For many years, the Project Manager was primarily associated with preparing information to support decisions made by sponsors, functional managers, or governance bodies. That responsibility remains relevant. The context, however, has altered. Today, a growing portion of the information required for decisions can be generated by intelligent systems capable of analyzing risks, simulating scenarios, identifying patterns, and formulating recommendations within seconds. Paradoxically, this evolution does not reduce the importance of human decision-making. It makes it more demanding. The greater the capacity to produce information, the greater the need to understand the assumptions embedded within it, recognize its limitations, and decide when it should or should not be followed. In this context, the Project Manager's contribution ceases to reside primarily in generating information. It comes to reside in the quality of the decision process. This does not mean replacing those with decision-making authority. It means contributing to ensuring that decisions occur under appropriate conditions:
However, speed without context merely increases the rate at which incoherent decisions propagate. True agility results from the ability to combine speed, understanding, and accountability. Preserving flow across boundaries One of the most relevant developments in recent research is the growing attention dedicated to boundary spanning. Projects are no longer understood merely as coordination mechanisms. They are recognized today as spaces where different organizational boundaries are continuously crossed:
It consists in contributing so that work, knowledge, decisions, and learning can flow across those boundaries without losing coherence, while accountability remains clear and traceable. When this flow is interrupted, loss of context, delays, conflicts, duplication of effort, inconsistent decisions, and the degradation of collective learning frequently emerge. Naturally, this work does not belong exclusively to the Project Manager. Specialists, functional leaders, sponsors, architects, product owners, and other stakeholders also perform liaison functions between different parts of the organization. However, due to the cross-cutting position they occupy throughout the initiative, the Project Manager is often in a privileged position to identify discontinuities, make dependencies visible, and facilitate the restoration of that flow. It is precisely at this point that preserving adaptive viability ceases to be merely an operational concern and comes to represent a critical organizational capability. Artificial intelligence and human-computational collaboration Much of the current discussion around artificial intelligence remains focused on task automation:
Yet this reading remains incomplete. Artificial intelligence does not merely alter the tools of Project Management. It alters the temporary organization itself. As people and intelligent systems collaborate more closely, new boundaries emerge:
They are organizational. The true impact of artificial intelligence does not consist merely in automating activities. It consists in increasing the need for coordination between human and computational capabilities within the temporary organization. The future of the profession will depend less on the direct execution of analytical tasks and more on the capability to contribute to a responsible, transparent, and coherent collaboration between people and intelligent systems. The Project Manager as part of the organizational sensing system There is a less obvious consequence of this evolution. Throughout a project, the Project Manager continuously tracks interactions among different areas, specialists, partners, customers, governance bodies, and, progressively, intelligent systems. This position affords them a particularly rich perspective on the dynamics of the temporary organization. Long before specific problems show up in formal metrics, small signals can become visible:
Together, they can reveal important shifts in the adaptive capacity of the initiative. It is in this sense that I propose understanding the Project Manager as part of the organization's organizational sensing system. Not because they concentrate all information, nor because they hold exclusive responsibility for organizational adaptation, but because their cross-cutting position allows them to observe relationships, dependencies, and inconsistencies that would hardly be perceived from within a single permanent function. This capacity does not replace formal monitoring mechanisms. It complements them. And it can significantly improve the quality of organizational adaptation. A new way to exercise leadership All these transformations inevitably lead to an evolution in project leadership. For many years, leading a project meant primarily coordinating teams, tracking progress, resolving conflicts, and ensuring execution. These responsibilities remain present. However, they no longer fully describe the leadership required in adaptive organizations. Leading a temporary organization means creating conditions for distributed capabilities to collaborate despite differences in knowledge, language, objectives, authority, and technology. It means:
of a system in permanent adaptation. Conclusion Throughout this article, I sought to answer a simple question: Why does an adaptive organization still need a Project Manager? The answer does not lie in the tasks traditionally associated with the profession. Those will continue to evolve, and many will be increasingly supported by artificial intelligence. The organizational problem that historically justified Project Management, however, remains. Organizations continue to require temporary configurations capable of integrating distributed capabilities to realize changes that no permanent unit can achieve in isolation. In some contexts, this function may be performed without a formal Project Manager title. What is essential, however, is not the job title. It is that the function of preserving the conditions for adaptive viability is explicitly assured, with responsibilities assigned according to legitimate authority, capability, and opportunity to act. When a Project Manager is formally entrusted with a central role in assuring this function, their distinctive contribution ceases to depend primarily on producing plans or controlling execution. It comes to depend on their capability to help create and preserve the conditions that allow context to be maintained, decisions to be facilitated, collaboration to be fostered, and work, knowledge, and learning to continue crossing organizational boundaries while accountability remains clear and traceable. The interpretation proposed in this article seeks to integrate recent contributions from research on temporary organizations, boundary spanning, and artificial intelligence applied to Project Management into a coherent understanding of the profession's evolution. If this interpretation is correct, the greatest transformation of the Project Manager does not lie in adopting new tools. It lies in how the Project Manager's contribution evolves as the organizational function itself becomes more demanding. And this conclusion naturally leads to the final article of this series: If the temporary organization itself must increasingly be capable of adaptation, how must project ways of working evolve with it? |
Posted on: August 23, 2026 04:15 AM
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The Limits of Optimization
 What Architecture Must Protect Optimization has become one of the defining ambitions of contemporary organizations. Improve performance. Reduce cost. Increase speed. Eliminate waste. Maximize efficiency. Artificial intelligence has amplified these ambitions dramatically. Organizations can now analyse vast amounts of information, identify patterns that previously remained invisible, simulate alternatives and continuously improve operational decisions at unprecedented scale and speed. These capabilities create extraordinary opportunities. Organizations that continuously improve how they allocate resources, coordinate activities and support decisions become more responsive, more resilient and better prepared to compete. Optimization is therefore not the problem. It is an essential organizational capability. The problem begins when organizations assume that everything capable of being optimized should become an object of optimization. That assumption appears reasonable. If something can be improved, why should it not be? Because optimization always depends upon conditions that it cannot independently legitimize. Every optimization process requires an objective. Every objective embodies criteria of value. Those criteria reflect priorities. Those priorities express institutional choices. Optimization does not produce those choices. It operates within them. This distinction is fundamental. Optimization is an instrumental capability that improves organizational performance within legitimately established architectural conditions. It may inform their review, but it cannot independently determine or redefine the Protected Institutional Conditions that make optimization itself legitimate. As organizations become increasingly AI-enabled, this distinction becomes considerably more important. Computational capabilities are becoming remarkably effective at recommending actions, allocating resources, sequencing work, coordinating activities and continuously improving operational performance. As these capabilities expand, so does the temptation to allow optimization itself to shape organizational priorities. That temptation is understandable. If optimization consistently improves operational outcomes, why should it not also determine what deserves to be optimized? Because organizational purpose cannot be derived from optimization. Neither can legitimate authority. Nor constitutional commitments. Nor legitimate accountability relationships. Optimization can identify increasingly effective ways of pursuing organizational objectives. It cannot independently determine which objectives remain institutionally legitimate. It can recommend more effective distributions of resources, responsibilities and decision flows. It cannot independently redefine the Protected Institutional Conditions that authorize those distributions. Optimization therefore operates within a framework of legitimacy that necessarily precedes every optimization process. That framework is expressed through Protected Institutional Conditions. This relationship fundamentally changes how optimization should be understood. Optimization is not an alternative to governance. It is one of the capabilities that governance enables. Governance, through architecture, establishes the Protected Institutional Conditions within which optimization can continuously improve organizational performance while remaining legitimate. When those Protected Institutional Conditions remain legitimate and sufficiently stable, optimization can create value. This distinction reveals that organizations operate with two fundamentally different categories. The first consists of Optimization Variables. These are elements whose continuous improvement is precisely the purpose of optimization. Operational processes. Resource allocation. Scheduling. Information flows. Operational quality. The second consists of Protected Institutional Conditions. Protected Institutional Conditions are legitimately established architectural conditions that provide continuity, direction and legitimacy to optimization and cannot be reduced to ordinary optimization variables within the systems whose operation they govern. Institutional purpose. Legitimate authority. Constitutional commitments. Protected decision rights. Legitimate accountability relationships. Strategic constraints. These conditions are not immutable. They may be reviewed. They may evolve. They may even be fundamentally redesigned. Their evolution, however, requires legitimate governance. It cannot emerge autonomously from the optimization processes they themselves authorize. Organizations often evaluate optimization through improvements in efficiency, productivity, quality or speed. These measures matter. But they describe only operational performance. They say very little about whether optimization has preserved the Protected Institutional Conditions required for the organization to remain governable. An organization may become operationally stronger while simultaneously becoming institutionally weaker. That possibility becomes increasingly significant as optimization extends beyond operational execution into decision formation itself. Artificial intelligence increasingly influences which information receives attention, which alternatives appear most attractive, how risks are prioritized and which recommendations become more persuasive. Each individual optimization may appear entirely reasonable. Collectively, however, those same optimizations may gradually reshape Protected Institutional Conditions that cannot legitimately become ordinary optimization variables. Authority may become progressively subordinate to efficiency. Purpose may become progressively subordinate to measurable outcomes. Legitimate accountability relationships may become progressively subordinate to predictive confidence. Institutional commitments may become progressively subordinate to local optimization. None of these shifts normally results from a single decision. They emerge gradually through many individually rational improvements. That is precisely why Architectural Governance becomes increasingly important. It preserves the distinction between Optimization Variables and Protected Institutional Conditions. Without that distinction, organizations do not simply optimize more. They gradually lose the Protected Institutional Conditions through which optimization itself remains legitimate. Architectural Governance does not exist to limit optimization. It exists to preserve the Protected Institutional Conditions that allow optimization to remain legitimate as organizations continuously evolve. This distinction fundamentally separates optimization from governance. Optimization asks: How can this objective be achieved more effectively? Governance asks: Should this objective continue to guide organizational action? These questions are complementary. But they are not interchangeable. Optimization improves performance. Governance determines legitimate institutional direction. Organizational architecture translates that direction into the conditions through which organizational action can remain coherent. Architectural Governance preserves those Protected Institutional Conditions while governing their legitimate evolution. Each performs a distinct organizational function. Confusing them gradually weakens all of them. This hierarchy becomes increasingly important as computational capabilities become more autonomous. Artificial intelligence can optimize decisions at a speed, scale and consistency that human organizations have never previously achieved. That capability represents an extraordinary organizational opportunity. But every increase in optimization capability also increases the importance of preserving the Protected Institutional Conditions that optimization itself cannot independently redefine. Otherwise, optimization gradually shifts from improving organizational performance to reshaping the institutional foundations that define organizational purpose. That transition rarely occurs through deliberate intent. It emerges incrementally. One optimization improves efficiency. Another removes friction. Another simplifies coordination. Another reallocates authority. Each decision appears locally rational. Collectively, however, they may gradually transform Protected Institutional Conditions that should evolve only through legitimate governance. This is why the limits of optimization are not technological. They are institutional. The greatest risk is not that optimization becomes more capable. It is that organizations gradually lose the distinction between improving performance and preserving the Protected Institutional Conditions that make performance meaningful. Optimization may recommend that Protected Institutional Conditions should be reviewed. It may reveal tensions. Identify inconsistencies. Simulate consequences. Support alternative designs. It can become an indispensable contributor to institutional learning. But it cannot independently authorize the redesign of the Protected Institutional Conditions that govern its own operation. Those decisions remain matters of legitimate governance. Protected Institutional Conditions are therefore not exceptions to adaptation. They are the institutional framework through which adaptation remains coherent, legitimate and strategically consequential. They provide continuity without creating rigidity. They enable evolution without allowing every institutional commitment to become an ordinary optimization variable. This is why optimization should never be understood as an autonomous organizational logic. Its value depends upon remaining embedded within legitimately governed Protected Institutional Conditions. The more powerful optimization becomes, the more valuable Architectural Governance becomes. Not because governance exists to constrain optimization. But because it preserves the Protected Institutional Conditions that allow optimization to continue serving the organization rather than gradually redefining it. Organizations therefore do not become stronger by optimizing everything. They become stronger by distinguishing between what should continuously improve and what must continue providing legitimate direction to that improvement. The future of AI-enabled organizations will depend not only on how intelligently they optimize. It will depend equally on how deliberately they preserve the Protected Institutional Conditions that optimization itself cannot legitimately replace. Optimization remains indispensable. Governance remains indispensable. Architectural Governance preserves the relationship between them. That relationship may ultimately become one of the defining capabilities of successful AI-enabled organizations. Yet one final question remains. If organizations must preserve the Protected Institutional Conditions that make governance legitimate, who preserves the legitimacy of governance itself? That is where the final article begins. Beyond Governance Who Governs the Governors? |
Posted on: August 21, 2026 06:28 AM
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M.O.R.E. Expands What Project Professionals Are Expected to Own. But Does Their Authority Expand with Their Accountability?
 I recently completed PMI's M.O.R.E. Masterclass. Its central proposition deserves serious consideration. Project professionals should not define success narrowly through execution. They should Manage Perceptions, Own Success, Relentlessly Reassess and Expand Perspective. PMI's current research reframes project success beyond schedule, budget and scope toward a broader conception incorporating stakeholder value and desired outcomes. There is much to support in that direction. A project can deliver what was planned and still fail to create meaningful value. Assumptions can become invalid. Stakeholder expectations can change. Benefits may depend on adoption long after delivery. Organizational conditions can evolve while the project is underway. Project professionals should care about all of this. But taking M.O.R.E. seriously raises a question that deserves equal attention: If M.O.R.E. expands what project professionals are expected to own, does their authority expand with their accountability? The answer is more complex than it first appears. The Move Beyond Execution Did Not Begin with M.O.R.E. Historical continuity matters when evaluating claims of professional change. In 2013, Jack S. Duggal presented How to change the world?: The next generation of project managers at PMI Global Congress 2013, North America. It was not a PMI standard and should not be represented as an official institutional position. But it formed part of PMI's professional intellectual ecosystem. Read today, its argument is striking. Duggal directly addressed the "Ownership and Accountability of Benefits and Outcomes" and challenged the conventional separation between responsibility for project execution and responsibility for benefits and outcomes. His broader argument moved toward holistic and integrative project management, stakeholder adoption and experience, adaptation, and greater responsibility for overall project success. This is not merely evidence that isolated components of M.O.R.E. existed before M.O.R.E. It is evidence of something more significant. More than a decade earlier, an integrated professional proposition combining broader project success, outcome ownership, stakeholder experience, holistic thinking, adaptation and responsibility beyond delivery had already been articulated within PMI's professional intellectual ecosystem. And this was not an isolated formulation. In 2014, Duggal extended the argument in How to change the world with project management. He again questioned narrow responsibility for execution and delivery, explicitly addressed ownership and accountability for benefits and outcomes, and connected project management more closely with change, adoption, results and benefits realization. Taken together, the two papers establish a documented intellectual continuity: Execution and delivery → adoption and outcomes Deliverables → benefits and value Narrow project responsibility → broader ownership Control → sensing, adjustment and adaptation Project manager → more integrative change-oriented professional That does not establish that M.O.R.E. derives from Duggal's work. Temporal precedence is not intellectual derivation. But it changes the novelty question. If a substantially integrated proposition combining broader success, outcome ownership, stakeholder experience, holistic thinking and continuous adaptation was already articulated within PMI's intellectual ecosystem in 2013 and further developed in 2014, what is substantively new in M.O.R.E. beyond its empirical codification, behavioral translation and institutional amplification? That is a more demanding test than asking whether individual M.O.R.E. practices existed before. It asks whether the integration itself is new. The Historical Record Is Richer Than Execution Versus Value The issue extends beyond these two conference papers. PMI's Benefits Realization Management work subsequently emphasized strategic alignment, value creation, benefits ownership, defined roles and explicit accountability. PMI states that BRM requires effective cooperation, defined roles and responsibilities, ownership and accountability, and identifies the benefits owner as an important role in overseeing benefits realization. This matters because it challenges an overly simple historical narrative: Traditional project management → scope, schedule, cost and execution versus Contemporary project management → value, outcomes, stakeholders, adaptation and impact. PMI's own intellectual history is more sophisticated than that contrast suggests. Long before M.O.R.E., its ecosystem was already wrestling with value, benefits, strategic alignment, stakeholder experience, broader definitions of project success, adaptation and accountability for outcomes. M.O.R.E. therefore cannot reasonably be treated as the origin of project management's movement toward value. The more interesting question is what it does with that inheritance. The Other Side of the Historical Debate Expanding responsibility for outcomes has always created another problem. Projects do not produce value through the project professional alone. Benefits may depend on business owners. Adoption may depend on operations. Product value may depend on product decision-making. Strategic priorities and investment decisions may belong to executives or governance bodies. Resources may be controlled outside the project. PMI's own BRM work recognized precisely this distributed reality by emphasizing defined roles, cooperation, benefits ownership and accountability. This reveals a fundamental organizational distinction: Value may be collectively produced, but authority, decision rights and accountability remain distributed. A project professional may recognize that a business case is deteriorating while someone else retains authority to continue the investment. They may identify that expected benefits are at risk while operational functions control the conditions necessary to realize them. They may challenge a strategic assumption while executives retain authority over strategy. They may recommend stopping a project without possessing legitimate authority to terminate it. The professional can and should exercise agency in all these situations. But agency is not authority. Influence is not a decision right. And concern for an outcome is not necessarily accountability for producing it. This Makes "Own Success" Particularly Important PMI's 2024 Maximizing Project Success research makes one of its four implications explicit: Own project success: Be accountable for the project's value, not only its execution. The four implications were: Manage perceptions. Own project success. Reassess parameters. Expand perspective. They subsequently became recognizable as the architecture of M.O.R.E.: Manage Perceptions. Own Success. Relentlessly Reassess. Expand Perspective. The 2025 Step Up research reports that 69% of stakeholders and executives expect project professionals to take primary responsibility for the elements embodied by M.O.R.E. It also reports an increase in NPSS from 27 to 94 when project professionals consistently practice all four elements. PMI now explicitly calls on project professionals to take greater ownership and move beyond execution toward outcomes and value. That makes the meaning of ownership more than a semantic issue. It becomes a governance question. What Does It Mean to Own Success? At least three interpretations are possible. 1. Behavioral Ownership "Own Success" may mean that project professionals refuse to hide behind the formal boundaries of delivery. They seek evidence. Question assumptions. Understand value. Challenge decisions. Influence stakeholders. Recommend action. Escalate threats they cannot legitimately resolve themselves. This interpretation is highly defensible. It expands professional agency without necessarily redistributing formal accountability. But it creates a novelty problem. If this is what Own Success means, much of its intellectual substance has strong antecedents in established project-management knowledge, including the integrated professional propositions articulated by Duggal in 2013 and 2014. 2. Shared Accountability Perhaps success is jointly owned across project professionals, sponsors, business owners, benefits owners, product leaders, executives and operational functions. That too can be defensible. But shared accountability requires architecture. Who decides? Who recommends? Who approves? Who commits resources? Who can change success criteria? Who owns benefits after transition? Who can terminate the investment? Who remains answerable when stakeholders disagree about what constitutes value? Without differentiation, shared accountability can become diluted accountability. 3. Substantive Outcome Accountability The strongest interpretation would make the project professional meaningfully accountable for overall project success and value. That would represent a more consequential professional shift. But it immediately creates another question: Where is the corresponding expansion of authority and decision rights? Accountability cannot simply migrate while the organizational power required to influence the relevant outcomes remains elsewhere. The M.O.R.E. Ownership Trilemma This produces what I would call the M.O.R.E. Ownership Trilemma: If "Own Success" denotes substantive outcome accountability, it requires a corresponding architecture of authority and decision rights. If it denotes shared accountability, it requires explicit differentiation to prevent accountability dilution and role conflict. If it denotes proactive professional agency within existing governance boundaries, it remains governance-coherent, but its incremental contribution over established project-management knowledge becomes more modest. None of these interpretations makes M.O.R.E. irrelevant. But they represent materially different propositions. And distinguishing between them determines what M.O.R.E. is actually asking the profession to become. The Strongest Defense of M.O.R.E. A serious critique should confront the strongest defense available. Perhaps M.O.R.E. is simply not intended to be a governance architecture. The 2026 From Vision to Practice: A Playbook to Apply M.O.R.E. provides practitioner-oriented guidance for applying M.O.R.E. and presents the framework as a practical way of moving beyond task execution toward owning outcomes and delivering value. This supports a plausible interpretation: M.O.R.E. may be better understood as a behavioral layer operating within a richer project-management architecture, rather than as a replacement for that architecture. That is a legitimate design choice. A behavioral framework does not need to reproduce every distinction contained in governance, sponsorship, benefits management, product management, systems thinking or the PMBOK Guide. Indeed, simplification may be one of its strengths. Four memorable dimensions can translate a large and fragmented body of professional knowledge into behaviors that practitioners can more easily remember, discuss and apply. But accepting this defense does not end the analysis. It creates another test: Can a simplified behavioral layer be safely and correctly applied when its meaning depends on governance distinctions that the layer itself does not fully express? For an experienced practitioner, "Own Success" may naturally mean: Understand, challenge, influence, recommend and escalate, while respecting legitimate decision authority. A less experienced practitioner may interpret exactly the same language as: I am responsible for making this project successful. Those are not equivalent propositions. Cognitive compression creates accessibility. It can also remove distinctions. Responsibility, Agency and Accountability Are Not the Same Three concepts should therefore remain distinct. Epistemic responsibility is the duty to understand what is happening, seek evidence, question assumptions and recognize material consequences. Professional agency is the duty to act on that understanding through challenge, recommendation, influence, collaboration and escalation. Outcome accountability is answerability for results within an architecture of legitimate authority, decision rights and meaningful causal influence. A project professional can possess extensive epistemic responsibility and professional agency without controlling every condition necessary to produce the eventual outcome. That is not diminished leadership. It is coherent governance. Was the Research Designed to Confirm PMI's Strategy? There is another question that deserves scrutiny. PMI's strategic commitment to maximizing project success preceded the publication of the 2024 research, and the research subsequently generated the broader project-success definition and four behavioral implications that would develop into M.O.R.E. PMI itself described the 2024 initiative as part of its commitment to Maximizing Project Success. That chronology raises a legitimate question: Was the research architecture sufficiently independent to discover something materially inconsistent with the institutional strategy within which it was conceived? The strongest criticism would be that the research was simply designed to validate a predetermined institutional conclusion. The evidence examined does not justify that claim. That conclusion matters. The 2024 program involved approximately 10,000 project professionals and 150 in-depth interviews. PMI describes the research goal as developing a definition of project success, measuring project success rates globally and understanding which factors are predictive of success. The underlying research considered different formulations of project success and both execution-oriented and outcome-oriented dimensions. There was therefore genuine empirical room for findings less aligned with a simplistic outcomes-only narrative. The strongest allegation of a wholly predetermined study does not survive the evidence currently available. But a more sophisticated question does. Data-Level Independence Is Not Interpretive-Level Independence Empirical evidence can tell us that stakeholders value outcomes. It can show associations between particular behaviors and perceived project success. It can identify factors predictive of success. But none of those findings automatically establishes: Project professionals should be accountable for the project's value. That is also a normative proposition about professional responsibility and governance. There is an inferential bridge between: What constitutes or predicts project success and Who should be accountable for producing that success. That bridge deserves explicit justification. The same issue arises in the subsequent M.O.R.E. research. PMI reports a striking relationship between consistent application of the four M.O.R.E. elements and NPSS, rising from 27 to 94. The 2026 Playbook states that professionals who fully adopt M.O.R.E. see their NPSS more than triple. Elsewhere, PMI uses even stronger public-facing language. Its M.O.R.E. page says that when project professionals fully embrace the four practices, "project success nearly quadruples", while its December 2025 press release says that M.O.R.E. "more than triples success rates." This makes methodological precision essential. Association, prediction and causation are not interchangeable. Higher-performing organizational environments may simultaneously enable M.O.R.E.-consistent behavior and produce greater project success. Governance maturity may matter. Leadership quality may matter. Professional competence may matter. Project selection may matter. Organizational capability may matter. Other variables may influence both behavior and outcomes. The stronger the causal language becomes, the stronger the evidence required to sustain it. The Research Question Therefore Changes The relevant question is no longer: Was M.O.R.E. simply invented to prove PMI's strategy? The evidence currently available does not support that conclusion. A better question is: How independent was the interpretation and normative codification of the empirical findings from the institutional strategy within which the research was conceived? That is a much more demanding methodological question. It distinguishes data-level independence from interpretive-level independence. And it avoids both extremes. We should neither assume institutional manipulation without evidence nor assume that a large empirical study makes the transition from evidence to institutional prescription epistemically neutral. What, Then, Is Actually New in M.O.R.E.? This brings the novelty question back into focus. The core intellectual territory occupied by M.O.R.E. has substantial antecedents in earlier project-management knowledge. More importantly, Duggal 2013 and 2014 weaken even the stronger proposition that M.O.R.E.'s principal conceptual novelty lies simply in integrating those elements. An integrated professional vision had already been articulated around: Broader project success, Outcome ownership, Stakeholder experience and adoption, Holistic thinking, Adaptation, Benefits and value, Responsibility beyond delivery. M.O.R.E.'s contribution may therefore lie elsewhere. It may provide cognitive compression, organizing dispersed expectations into four memorable dimensions. It may provide behavioral translation, converting broad principles into practitioner-level practices. It may provide pedagogical integration, enabling these behaviors to be taught through cases, reflection and application. It may provide a common professional language capable of crossing predictive, adaptive and hybrid environments. It adds empirical codification, associating a defined behavioral architecture with PMI's contemporary measure of project success. And perhaps most importantly, it provides institutional amplification, making this conception of professional behavior central to PMI's contemporary vision of the profession. PMI describes M.O.R.E. as a call to action for the profession and directly connects it with the shift from project management success to project success. These are potentially meaningful contributions. But they are different from originating the underlying project-management knowledge. A framework can add substantial practical value without inventing its constituent ideas. The appropriate test is therefore not simply: Is M.O.R.E. new? It is: Does the particular M.O.R.E. architecture create explanatory power, predictive value, practical utility or professional capability beyond what existed in its constituent and integrated antecedents? That remains an empirical question. The Harder Question Is Organizational The central issue is therefore not whether project professionals should care about outcomes. They should. Nor should the profession retreat into narrow execution. The historical evidence makes clear that this debate was already moving beyond such boundaries many years ago. The harder question is: How far can professional responsibility expand before organizational authority must expand with it? Suppose a project professional discovers that the business case no longer holds. There is a duty to notice. A duty to investigate. A duty to evidence. A duty to challenge. A duty to recommend. And, where necessary, a duty to escalate. But authority to terminate the investment is a separate matter. The same distinction applies to strategic choices, product decisions, benefits realization, operational adoption and resource allocation. Expanded professional responsibility does not automatically confer expanded decision legitimacy. Toward Governable Professional Agency This suggests a principle that could complement M.O.R.E.: A project professional's accountability for outcomes should remain proportionate to the legitimate authority, decision rights, competence, causal influence and opportunity to act available to that professional. This principle does not reduce professional responsibility. It expands responsibility while preserving legitimate attribution. Project professionals should see more. Understand more. Question more. Reassess more. Challenge more. Influence more. Escalate when necessary. And care deeply about whether projects actually create value. But organizations must preserve clarity about who possesses authority to decide and who remains accountable for outcomes dependent on those decisions. Otherwise, expanded professional ownership risks transforming an organizational governance problem into an individual responsibility problem. Perhaps the Real Opportunity Is to Connect the Two M.O.R.E. asks an important question: What more should project professionals do to help projects succeed? Organizations need to answer its counterpart: What must governance, authority and decision rights enable so that project professionals can legitimately exercise that expanded agency? The two questions belong together. The future of project management should not be a return to execution. But neither should it become an expansion of accountability without boundaries. The objective should be governable professional agency. Expand professional agency as far as necessary to understand, challenge, influence and protect project value. Keep formal outcome accountability traceable to the legitimate authority, decision rights and causal influence through which that value can actually be produced. M.O.R.E. may therefore be most valuable not because project management has finally discovered value, nor because project professionals should simply become accountable for everything that determines success. Its stronger contribution may be its ability to make long-developing professional expectations more visible, memorable, actionable and institutionally salient. If so, the next step is not simply to ask project professionals to own more. It is to ensure that what they are expected to own, what they are empowered to decide, and what they can legitimately be held accountable for remain coherent. That is where M.O.R.E. meets governance. And that is where the more important conversation begins. References Duggal, J. S. (2013). How to change the world?: The next generation of project managers. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2013, North America, New Orleans, LA. Project Management Institute. PMI official source, Duggal 2013 Duggal, J. S. (2014). How to change the world with project management. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2014, EMEA, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Project Management Institute. PMI official source, Duggal 2014 Project Management Institute. (2016). Establishing Benefits Ownership and Accountability. Benefits Realization Thought Leadership Series. PMI official source, Benefits Ownership and Accountability The Boston Consulting Group. (2016). Connecting Business Strategy and Project Management. Benefits Realization Thought Leadership Series, Project Management Institute. PMI official source, Connecting Business Strategy and Project Management Project Management Institute. (2024). Maximizing Project Success: What Is Project Success? PMI official source, Maximizing Project Success Project Management Institute. (2024). Project Management Institute Champions a New Era of "Project Success": Launches Groundbreaking Research to Drive Value and Recognition for the Profession. PMI official source, 2024 research announcement Project Management Institute. (2025). Step Up: Redefining the Path to Project Success with M.O.R.E. PMI official source, Step Up Walker, D. (2025). Step Up: A New Vision for Project Success. Project Management Institute. PMI official source, Step Up: A New Vision for Project Success Project Management Institute. (2025). New PMI Research Reveals Strategy-Execution Gap Is Undermining Transformation – And How to Close It. PMI official press release Project Management Institute. (2026). From Vision to Practice: A Playbook to Apply M.O.R.E. PMI official source, M.O.R.E. Playbook Project Management Institute. (2026). Delivering M.O.R.E. PMI official source, Delivering M.O.R.E. |
Posted on: August 20, 2026 12:50 PM
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