25 September 2026
I joined the Supercharged Podcast to talk about the gap between project management theory and the reality of delivery — what textbooks leave out, and what experience teaches you.
In September 2022 I was invited onto the Supercharged Podcast to talk about project management — specifically, the gap between how it's taught and how it's actually done.
It's a gap I've been living in for fifteen years.
The textbooks are full of frameworks. PRINCE2 gives you stage gates, RAID logs, business cases and change control. Agile gives you sprints, stand-ups and retrospectives. Both have their place. Both are useful. But neither of them tells you what to do when the Programme Director changes their mind on a Friday afternoon and wants the whole plan rewritten by Monday. Neither of them tells you how to manage a senior stakeholder who is brilliant at their job but impossible in a room. Neither of them tells you what it actually feels like to be the person standing at the front of the room owning a programme that's behind schedule, over budget and politically exposed — and still having to project calm confidence to a team that's looking to you for direction.
That's the gap. Between the theory and the room.
I've never found a course that teaches you how to read a room, how to pick your moment with a difficult stakeholder, how to know when governance is helping delivery and when it's strangling it. Those things come from doing it, repeatedly, in different organisations with different cultures and different kinds of pressure.
What I told the podcast, and what I still believe, is that the best project managers are the ones who've learned to hold two things at once: the discipline of the framework and the flexibility to know when to set it aside. Rigid governance in the wrong moment doesn't protect a programme — it slows it down. And a good PM knows the difference.
The conversation ranged across a lot of ground — how I got into PM, what I've learned from the hardest engagements, what I look for when I walk into a new organisation. If you're earlier in your PM career and wondering whether the gap I'm describing is real, it is. But it's also bridgeable. Every difficult engagement teaches you something the next one benefits from.
That's what fifteen years looks like.
Want to continue the conversation?
I'm always happy to talk project management.