Conceptual and Observed Foundations of Applied Project Management

1. Communication is the core of project management.
2. Communication can be optimized for outcomes, particularly as it is more and more digitized and measurable, even and especially as machines like AI play a growing role.
3. Project management is a category of applied economics, and applied management philosophy.
4. A project manager is a practitioner of applied theory, awareness of perceived constraints, persuasion and understanding people (particularly their orientation toward uncertainty, and the orientation a specific machine takes). This means creativity is core to project management.
5. Scope has an exploratory purpose. Schedule and budget are part of what is explored, with hypotheses of schedule and budget tested during the course of the project.
6. People are the source of all creativity and, all wicked complexity on projects.
7. Testing schedule and budget through scope is a matter of creativity and assumptions about all project participants.
8. Communication is the mechanism for working with people. And now, also, for working with AI, which is a form of measurable and digitized communication: communication with the machine, communication with machine influenced output and humans, communication with a machine that can raise the expectation on and that can influence creativity, output and human behavior.
9. Communication is part of what frames our mental models and how we approach and interact with the world. By definition, then, of how we approach projects, other people, the elements being tested and explored and, our orientation toward uncertainty.
10. An orientation toward uncertainty, rather than toward certainty, changes the dynamics on a project and in a project environment. It turns uncertainty into competitive advantage.

Through a More Expository Lens
Project management is the application of tools, techniques, experience and knowledge to the execution of defined endeavors with uncertain outcomes. The key underlying variable is that it is people who execute the endeavors, it is people who define the target outcomes and it is people who apply the tools, techniques, experience and knowledge. And people, bring uncertainty. That uncertainty is the source of the aspiration of the stakeholders and all project participants. It is the source of creativity and competitive advantage, while also being the source of most things that make projects unpredictable. There are numerous techniques and tools that can be used to reduce, measure, manage and impact the performance of a project (which, by definition, is the performance of people, be they the people doing the project, managing the project or defining success of the project). Since the key underlying variable is people, communication has the largest impact on project performance since communication is how people interact with each other (how all project participants interact with each other).

The communication environment, then, becomes a central element of project performance with elements of how the communication environment is designed (whether intentionally designed or the unintentional design elements) and design elements of communication objects (the ways we communicate) being impactful to how the project performs. As communication objects become more digitized and more easily measurable, across different dimensions, and as communication environments become more digitized and more easily measurable, their impact on project performance can be measured and optimized for specific outcomes.

This whole train of thought is the main substance of my book, Reinventing Communication: How to Design, Lead and Manage High Performing Projects (Routledge, 2014). The lenses and voices on project performance itself are further discussed, in an expanded form, from 35 authors from more than 15 countries across 4 continents, and from very different perspectives and fields of work, in The Practitioner’s Handbook of Project Performance: Agile, Waterfall and Beyond (Routledge, 2019).

It is clear to see from the train of thought described above, how questions of uncertainty, consciousness and in particular, AI (as something that can potentially apply tools, techniques, knowledge and experience, as well as execute projects or other tasks), can all play a part in the continued interweaving of ideas and application in a human and increasing digital world (particularly when the digital changes the design elements of environments, objects and us, ourselves). This is where the rest of the blog comes in. Not to say that the other topics are all subsets of this original topic. Each topic and exploration rests on their merits. But the theme of integrating and interweaving different domains (human domains) into, between and across boundaries of fields and applications, is a motivating driver and vantage point, perspective, of the blog and of my work. There’s also posts I write for fun.

Within the domain of project management, I’d start with What is A Project Manager and, if you want to get a feel for how various explorations into new areas take place and my approach of taking numerous vantage points onto a situation, read the post on how Business is Applied Philosophy. The glossary of project communication is also helpful. When thinking about uncertainty, my ground level contention is that uncertainty is not something to be reduced away. It is a fundamental reality of projects (and all human endeavors, for that matter) and it is a source of competitive advantage. I believe we can also look at project management, and projects in general, as a smaller unit of measurement, experiment design and study, particularly for applied economics, with lessons applicable to less measurable domains, on a larger scale.

Many of the explorations, applications and topics discussed between 2014 and 2026 became chapters in my upcoming book Strategic Decision-Making: An Integrated Approach to Uncertainty (Routledge, 2027). A topic that is currently scratching my mind is exploring situations when optionality ends. When there is a massive wall or boundary of uncertainty, of such proportions, that there are no knowable options or moves on the other side of it. Or even knowable, or thinkable ways to be on the other side of it.

Some other relevant links:
Defining Complexity for Practitioners
Understanding Uncertainty in Projects
WBS, Trust and Project Performance