Over the last several years, my professional life has gone in a few different directions.
I’ve continued consulting and training, but I’ve also spent a significant amount of time working in real estate, renovating properties, managing construction projects, building rental properties, and running several small businesses.
Recently, I’ve found myself getting back to my roots.
For most of my career, those roots have been pretty simple: helping people get difficult work done.
Sometimes that has meant managing a large project or program. Sometimes it has meant helping an organization change the way it works. Sometimes it has meant coaching an executive or project leader through a difficult situation. And sometimes it has meant standing in front of a room teaching people better ways to manage projects, products, teams, and organizations.
The titles have changed over the years—project manager, program manager, Agile coach, consultant, trainer, executive coach—but the underlying work has been remarkably consistent.
Figure out what we are trying to accomplish.
Understand what is getting in the way.
Get the right people aligned.
Create enough structure to move forward.
And then help people execute.
A Career Built Around Projects
I have spent more than three decades managing projects, leading programs, training professionals, and helping organizations improve how work gets done.
A large portion of that career eventually became associated with Agile and organizational transformation. I started working with Agile approaches early, spent years coaching teams and organizations, and have trained thousands of people in Agile, Scrum, Lean, project leadership, and related disciplines.
But I have never thought of myself as someone whose job was simply to “implement Agile.”
The real job was always improving performance.
Are priorities clear?
Does the organization know what it is actually trying to accomplish?
Do the people doing the work understand the goal?
Are decisions being made quickly enough?
Are organizational structures helping the project—or fighting it?
Is leadership creating clarity or adding more confusion?
Are teams producing activity, or are they producing results?
Those questions apply whether the organization is using Scrum, traditional project management, a hybrid delivery model, or no formal framework at all.
Stepping Away Also Taught Me Something
Over the last few years, I deliberately spent more of my time outside traditional corporate consulting.
I invested in real estate. I renovated properties. I managed contractors, budgets, schedules, inspections, permitting issues, vendors, tenants, and all the unexpected problems that come with physical projects.
In many ways, it was very different from leading a technology or organizational initiative.
In other ways, it was exactly the same.
A project is still a project.
There is a goal. There are constraints. There is uncertainty. There are dependencies. People make commitments. Things go wrong. Priorities compete. Decisions have consequences.
And sooner or later somebody has to figure out what happens next.
Working on physical projects reinforced something I had already learned after decades of consulting: good project leadership is rarely about following a methodology perfectly.
It is about judgment.
It is about knowing when you need more structure and when the structure itself has become the problem.
It is about being able to look through a lot of noise, identify the few things that actually matter, and get people focused on them.
Why Fractional Work Makes Sense
That is one of the reasons I have become increasingly interested in fractional project and program leadership.
Many organizations have important work that needs experienced leadership, but that does not necessarily mean they need another full-time executive or permanent senior project manager.
They may have a major initiative that is beginning to drift.
A project may be behind schedule and nobody has a particularly clear picture of why.
There may be a temporary leadership gap.
Multiple departments may be involved, but nobody truly owns the work across the organization.
A project manager may be doing a good job but needs an experienced sounding board.
An executive may know something isn't working but need an outside perspective to help determine what to change.
Or an organization may simply have more important work than its existing leadership team has the capacity to manage.
Those are situations where fractional support can make a lot of sense.
Instead of starting another lengthy recruiting process or adding another permanent position, an experienced project leader can step in, understand the situation, establish direction, help stabilize the work, and provide the level of support the organization actually needs.
Sometimes that is a few hours a week.
Sometimes it is several days a week.
Sometimes it is a concentrated effort to rescue or stabilize a project and then hand it back to the internal team.
The point is not to create dependency.
The point is to create traction.
Project Leadership, Not More Process
One thing I am particularly conscious of after many years in the Agile transformation world is that organizations usually do not need another person arriving with a new methodology.
They need someone capable of understanding the problem before prescribing the solution.
That may involve improving governance.
It may involve rebuilding a realistic schedule.
It may mean clarifying roles and accountability.
It may mean helping an executive make several decisions that have been avoided for months.
It may involve coaching a project manager.
It may mean facilitating a difficult conversation between departments.
It could involve changing the way the team is working.
Or it could simply mean bringing some discipline and visibility to a project that has become difficult to understand.
The tools should fit the problem—not the other way around.
Coaching Has Always Been Part of the Work
Another part of my roots is coaching.
Some of the most useful consulting conversations I have had over the years have not happened in a formal workshop or project meeting.
They have happened one-on-one with an executive, project manager, Scrum Master, product leader, or team member trying to work through a difficult decision.
Sometimes people do not need another framework.
They need someone who has seen similar situations before, can ask good questions, challenge their thinking when necessary, and help them see the situation from a different angle.
That is why coaching and facilitation remain an important part of the work I am doing now.
That can include executive coaching, project leadership coaching, team facilitation, or simply serving as an experienced sounding board for someone carrying a difficult initiative.
Training Still Matters—When It Is Connected to Real Work
Training has also remained one of the most rewarding parts of my career.
I have been teaching Agile and project-management-related topics for many years, and I still enjoy it.
But I am increasingly interested in training that is directly connected to problems organizations are actually trying to solve.
Training for training's sake rarely changes very much.
Training becomes much more valuable when people can immediately apply what they learn to the work sitting in front of them.
That might be a workshop on improving user stories using the team's actual backlog.
It could be project leadership training built around problems the organization's project managers are currently facing.
It might be an executive Agile session focused on the organizational barriers teams are actually encountering.
Teach something useful.
Apply it immediately.
Help people become more capable.
That is the kind of training I have always enjoyed most.
In Some Ways, I Never Really Left
So when I say I am getting back to my roots, I am not really talking about returning to something I abandoned.
The work has evolved.
The industries have changed.
I have spent more time building businesses, investing in properties, swinging a hammer, and dealing with contractors than I expected when I started my career.
But the common thread is still there.
Projects.
Problems.
People.
Decisions.
Execution.
Helping someone move from “We need to figure this out” to “We know what we're doing next.”
That is the work I have always enjoyed.
And that is increasingly where I am focusing Cape Project Management again.
Today that includes fractional project and program leadership, short-term project stabilization, advisory support, executive and project leadership coaching, facilitation, and focused training.
Not every organization needs another full-time person.
Sometimes you just need someone experienced enough to step into a complicated situation, understand what is happening, and help get the work moving again.
That feels a lot like getting back to my roots.