A Practitioner’s Guide to the PM+CM Integration Reference At the end of every session, I teach on PM and CM integration, I share one artifact; a single-page reference table that maps every phase of the project lifecycle across three columns: what PM owns, what CM owns, and what they share. No jargon. No framework complexity. One page, meant to be used on your next project, starting tomorrow. The response is always the same: this is the thing we’ve been missing. This article i

How to Build Leadership Buy-In That Actually Sustains Every seasoned change practitioner has lived this scenario. You’ve built the stakeholder map. You’ve secured executive sponsorship. The right leader sent the email, showed up at the kickoff, and said the right things. And then, six months into implementation, adoption is stalling and when you trace it back, you find that leadership “support” was a one-time act, not a sustained posture. Sponsorship is not buy-in. Endorsemen

Leading and Lagging Indicators for Integrated PM+CM Projects One of the most consistent themes in conversations I have with project and change practitioners is this: we know how to measure delivery, but we don’t know what to measure for change. Go live date, budget variance, scope adherence; these are well-understood. But “did the change stick?” is a question most teams can’t answer with data because they never defined what the data should look like. This is a solvable probl

Why PM and CM Need to Stop Running on Parallel Tracks There’s a moment most project managers and change practitioners know well. The system goes live. The budget closes clean. The project is declared a success. And then, six months later, someone asks: Is anyone actually using it? The silence that follows that question is expensive. This is the gap I’ve spent my career studying and closing; the space between delivery and adoption, between a project that finished and a change

A practical tool for quantifying what's really costing you and deciding where to start In my last article, I talked about sorting the problems you observe into four buckets: Process, People, Systems, and Data. If you did that exercise, even informally, you probably ended up with a list that felt both clarifying and overwhelming in equal measure. Clarifying, because you could finally see the shape of things. Overwhelming, because now you must decide where to start. This is the

A simple lens for making sense of what you're observing A few weeks ago, I wrote about curiosity; specifically, about the practice of going to where the work happens and observing with genuine openness instead of judgment. The response was something I didn't expect. Messages, mostly some version of the same thing: "Yes. But then what? I went looking, and now I'm staring at a wall of problems, and I don't know where to begin." I hear you. And I want to be honest with you: visi

On resilience, adaptability, and the kind of exhaustion that ‘actually’ fills you up. You know the feeling. Your brain is at capacity. You’ve absorbed more ideas in a single stretch than most people encounter in a month. Your eyes are heavy. And yet, you don’t want to stop. Not because you’re running on adrenaline or caffeine, but because something real is happening in the room, in the conversation, in the space between the thinking. You’re not depleted. You’re full. I call i

On beginner's mind, asking for help, and what happens when you put down the phone and pay attention. Today my husband and I took the kids to ride the city bus for the first time. Not as tourists on a metro system with color-coded maps and multilingual signage. Not abroad, where public transit is so woven into daily life that even a newcomer can follow the rhythm of it. Here. In our own city. A mostly empty bus on a Friday, and four people who had no idea what they were doing.

Women's History Month has me thinking about something we don't talk about enough: The moment when everything changes and you must decide who you are without the title. My story didn’t start in the boardroom. It started in a doorway. I grew up with privilege. My father was a doctor in Peru, a respected leader in his field. Our life was full: good schools, a tight family, a foundation many people spend their whole careers trying to build. I was thirteen years old and we left ev