April 10, 2026
Volume 04 - Issue 14
This week I’m loving
This week’s love goes out to Simina Fodor for yet another tour de force post. This one subtly hints at one of the key reasons I feel generalist PMs are strongly positioned to lead the future: empathy.
This is your secret superpower.
The hardest part of delivery leadership isn’t learning the framework.
It’s operating in the space where the framework stops helping.
Where:
signals are unclear
conversations are uncomfortable
and clarity has to be created, not followed
Often people say that you might use “soft skills” to navigate this space.
But really - to understand what is going on under the surface you have to think and feel someone else’s thoughts. That’s just one skill.
And as we continue down the road our profession is on, more and more of the navigation will be in disruption, murkiness, and uncertainty. The place where frameworks are a pipe dream and work is coming to a standstill.
Because delivery isn’t a process problem.
It’s a system of people problem.
From the Practice
Several weeks ago now, the Agile Alliance and Project Management Institute publish a new thought provoking document called the Enterprise Agility Manifesto. I’ve been pondering on this document for a while and still feel strongly that it has its pros and cons. But this week, I read Americo Pinto’s article on the link between the Manifesto and PMOs and I have to say friends, this one is worth the read.
The question is no longer how work is delivered, but whether the organization is capable of adapting in a way that continues to create, redirect, and sustain value, deliberately, under pressure, and at scale.
The PMO’s responsibility is shifting critically away from doing to guiding. And this guiding isn’t about execution. It’s about value.
Organizations aren’t just going to be adopting some best practice or other and continuing to largely be the same. They will be reconfiguring, fundamentally, at the strategic core.
A shift from funding execution toward funding intent sounds sensible at a conceptual level, but in practice it asks the organization to operate very differently. It asks leaders to align investment dynamically to purpose and expected outcomes, then trust the system to translate that intent into meaningful results.
A PMO isn’t just going to be shaping the projects it oversees. It is going to be influencing the design of the organization overall.
For PMO leaders, the implication is more direct. It requires moving from managing work to deliberately designing how value is enabled — starting from customer needs, translating them into services, and continuously adapting those services as outcomes evolve.
An interesting read
This week’s interesting read comes to us from Mike Fisher. This one is dense and juicy, so grab a quiet corner and a cup of coffee and really dive in and I promise you won’t be disappointed. Mike jumps into the heart of something we are seeing in many organizations at the moment: an obsession with data and dashboards as a way of “automating” our understanding of our business. AI is driving this obsession by helping organizations find data they didn’t know they had and instantly present it like it is valuable.
Dashboards, alerts, KPIs, uptime monitors, customer feedback loops, these are the alarm systems of modern organizations. Leaders make decisions based on the assumption that when something is wrong, they will know. Product teams assume that regressions will surface through metrics. Executives assume that if a chart is green, things are fine. But what if the chart is wrong?
Mike uses a real world event from 2003 as an illustration of this risk highly effectively.
This article will leave you asking some tough questions about your metrics, your data, and where your failsafes are.
A tip
I’ve met many generalist PMs operating outside the core project management roles. One common area is Product Owners. If you are looking to enhance your skills in this area check out a recent release of self-paced learning available from Scrum.org.
A lesson
This week’s lesson is around something I’m seeing more and more teams struggle with: “relentless delivery pressure”. You know the symptoms: a team with no slack; constantly feeling behind; struggling to deliver fast but paradoxically going slower while doing so. As agile adoption spreads, it feels like this problem is sweeping behind it like a wave. This week’s lesson is the antidote: agile governance.
Agile governance actively protects sustainable pace. It creates space to ask if we are working at a speed we can maintain, to understand whether the cost of acceleration outweighs the value delivered and if people and systems are still healthy enough to continue.
The brake, applied early, prevents the crash later.
As teams transition from traditional project management to agile ways of working governance is often thrown out the window. People are thrilled to get rid of the compliance rituals they perceived as blocking progress and the endless approval hoops to jump through. But the absence of governance in agile projects isn’t the right approach.
…in an agile context, governance serves a very different purpose. It provides clarity of intent, transparency of decision-making, and confidence to act.
It’s a well-timed, intentional slow-down, that allows the team to accelerate as it exits the reflection.
Well-governed teams move together, and that cohesion allows them to accelerate far more effectively.
Governance doesn’t provide moments of restriction or constraint - it provides moments of orientation.
Interested to learn more? In addition to the great explanations in the article the Agile Governance Consortium Business Agility Think Tank has produced a thorough white paper on Agile Governance. Check it out here.