Articles

Andre Malowney writing at a desk, working through project management reference texts and printed process diagrams

Practical thinking for project professionals

Articles on project delivery, governance, risk, predictive, Agile and hybrid practice, alongside a growing PMP® knowledge library for professionals preparing for the current exam.

Backlog Refinement: What It Is and Why It Matters

Refinement produces nothing, which is why it goes first in a busy quarter and why the cost turns up three weeks later in a planning session that settles nothing.

Sprint Review vs Retrospective

Two events an hour apart in most calendars, and what separates them is not the agenda. It is who is in the room, which is why combining them costs so much.

Closing a Project Properly Still Matters

Closure is where a project stops being a project and becomes somebody's responsibility to run. Most of what makes that work cannot be done retrospectively.

Executing in an Adaptive Project

Managers moving from predictive delivery into iterative work often say execution feels shapeless. It has plenty of shape, and most of it sits inside the cycle rather than the calendar.

Initiating Is Not Just Something You Do Once

The Focus Areas are drawn as a line, with initiating at the front of it. On a real project the question of who authorised this work, and whether it still matters, comes back at every boundary.

Project Phases: Useful Structure or False Comfort?

Phases feel like structure, but a boundary only does work if a real decision sits on it. How to tell a working gate from a decorative one, and where boundaries belong on predictive, adaptive and hybrid delivery.