The Digital Project Manager

How to Manage Projects Like Investments (Not Just Deliverables)

• Galen Low

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Project managers are often tasked with delivering “on time and on budget”—but what if that’s not enough? In this episode, Galen Low sits down with Stephen Devaux, a longtime project management theorist and the mind behind techniques like critical path drag and value breakdown structures. Together, they unpack why project leaders need to start managing their work like investors—not just builders—and why this mindset shift matters more than ever in the AI era.

From projects that save lives to projects that launch products, Stephen explains how understanding a project’s value profile—not just its deliverables—is the key to smarter decision-making. They cover real-world applications of treating projects as investments, explore the bridge-building metaphor that will stick with you for life, and discuss how AI could (and should) support project managers in this paradigm shift.

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Galen Low:

Why is it suddenly so important that project leaders start treating their projects as investments?

Stephen Devaux:

If we don't treat projects as investments, then what do we focus on? Cost, budgets. So as a result, finance departments, which often have no clue about how projects are done, they have a huge amount of weight. Frequently, by spending another $5000, we may increase the return on that project by $50,000. Wouldn't you like to do that?

Galen Low:

The impact of a project, that return on investment, is it always money?

Stephen Devaux:

Absolutely not. Projects are often used to save lives in fields like pharmaceutical or medical device development in emergency response. So one of the things that I have developed is this concept of a damage control time chart, so that if we do a project, we can optimize that project on the basis of saving the most lives, avoiding the most damage.

Galen Low:

What does the future look like? Are we looking at something more sudden where the role of the project leader changes dramatically?

Stephen Devaux:

I think that there're going to be roles for many people on projects. The program manager and the significant project managers are going to have good roles, and I hope better remunerated rules. Because schedulers are extremely valuable and ultimately good schedulers need to be better remunerated because boy, are they adding a lot of value. Now, a couple more things...

Galen Low:

welcome to The Digital Project Manager Podcast — the show that helps delivery leaders work smarter, deliver smoother, and lead their teams with confidence in the age of AI. I'm Galen, and every week we dive into real world strategies, emerging trends, proven frameworks, and the occasional war story from the project front lines. Whether you're steering massive transformation projects, wrangling AI workflows, or just trying to keep the chaos under control, you're in the right place. Let's get into it. Alright, today we are talking about three things. We're talking about PMBOK 8. We're talking about how to treat projects as investments, and we are talking about Moneyball. How those three things are connected will become clear. But our goal today is to arm you with some practical techniques that you can start using today to ride the wave into a new paradigm of project management that's shaping up pretty fast. With me today is Stephen Devaux — or as he's known in the industry, Steve the Bajan. Steve is a project management theorist, consultant, author, and educator with over three decades of experience contributing to the craft. Stephen is the innovator behind concepts and techniques like critical path drag and value breakdown structures, which are now officially baked into the recently released 8th Edition of PMI's Project Management Body of Knowledge, or PMBOK. He's also the author of"Managing Projects as

Investments:

Earned Value to Business Value" and

"Total Project Control:

A Practitioner’s Guide to Managing Projects as Investments". Today he is a prolific keynote speaker and the president of Analytic Project Management, which provides courses and consulting based on his concepts around treating projects like an investment. Steve, thank you so much for being with me here today.

Stephen Devaux:

Thank you Galen, for doing this.

Galen Low:

I've been watching a lot of your talks. We've been gabbing. I know that you and I, we can go off on many tangents and probably spend the whole day talking about project management. I'll try and cap us for the benefit of our listeners. But here's the roadmap I've sketched out today. To start us off, I just wanted to like frame things in with like one big question, something that everyone wants to know the answer to, but something that is actually just scratching the surface. And then I'd like to zoom out from that and talk about three things. First, I wanted to talk about how you came up with a concept of treating a project like an investment, and what that even looks like in practice. Then I'd like to dig into why this method matters right now in an age of AI, when some are saying that tools, software, and large language models will render human project managers obsolete. Lastly, I'd like to explore the implications for the future if the role of the project manager shifts maybe more dramatically from task management and project controls to managing a portfolio of investments like the head of a private equity firm. How does that sound to you? Sounds great. Awesome. I thought I'd start us off with like one big hairy question. Here's a little bit of context. I've seen a lot of dialogue lately about project leaders being CEOs for their projects. I've seen people talking about impact and value realization, and I see the conversation shifting towards project leaders needing to do more than just deliver projects. Meanwhile, the idea of managing projects like an investment, so that projects earn their ROI. It's been around for years, so I wanted to ask why is it suddenly so important that project leaders start treating their projects as investments? Why did it take so long for this concept to catch on?

Stephen Devaux:

Quick answer. I really have no idea why it took so long for this concept to catch on any more than I fully understand why it took so long for a simple concept like critical path drag to catch on. It seems to me that both of them are just obvious, but here's the thing. If we don't treat projects as investments. Then what do we focus on? Indeed, what have we been focusing on with projects, cost budgets? So as a result, finance departments, which often have no clue about how projects are done, what a work breakdown structure is, what a critical path is, what earned value is, any of these concepts. They have a huge amount of weight, I would say more weight than anything else in terms of a project, because they set the budget. In fact, it's fine to set a budget, but frequently by spending another $5,000, we may increase the return on that project by $50,000. Wouldn't you like to do that? If we aren't figuring out how much the value of the project is, which is to say the value of its scope, how much that value can be increased, four, decreased by its duration, which is to say the length of its critical path, then we really aren't able to manage the budget appropriately to get the resources that will increase our value.'Cause that's what an, we want to do on an investment. Right?

Galen Low:

Absolutely. And you know what I love about that is that I think a lot of the times, as project managers, we get trained in this box of delivery, getting the thing done. And then we also get trained with this notion of like managing scope, but usually managing scope is treated as keep it within this box and don't let it get out of the box. You're saying something different. You're saying if there's an opportunity to have a greater return on investment, like project leaders should be chasing that down. We should be the ones going, we need to increase scope because that's gonna increase value and that's something that I think a lot of project managers. Don't feel like it's their role. They feel like their role is to just take the scope, take the budget, take the resources they've got and deliver within that. And there is more conversation about impact and driving business outcomes. But I think there's this mindset of like, okay, well how can I even do that? But I really like what you said there, which is like if you're treating it like an investment, you want the maximum return on that investment. The second thing I wanted to bring up was, we were talking in terms of money. And I think a lot of folks think about return on investment as money, but I've seen some of your talks like the impact of a project that return on investment, is it always money?

Stephen Devaux:

Absolutely not. My main things, my main purposes in life at this point is to extend these methods. Two areas beyond money. I have no problem with banks making more money or automobile manufacturers. That's all fine and great, but projects are often used to save lives in fields like pharmaceutical or medical device development. In emergency response, an earthquake, for instance, to a pandemic response, right, and to delivery of vaccines. These things are hugely and lots of other indeed public health initiatives. Which, if someone does research that shows that we can save lives by doing X, then we should implement a project to do X. And with every day that passes frequently in such projects, people are dying. So one of the things that I have developed in the past few years, which I hope will be spread, is this concept of a damage control time chart or DCTC. Which is with an ongoing emergency, one of the first things we'd like to know is how many people are gonna be dying out into the future, or how much damage is going to be done so that if we do a project to avoid it, we can optimize that project on the basis of saving the most lives, avoiding the most damage. That's through scope, but it's also through delivering the scope with the biggest bang for the buck as soon as possible. Which again, is a, is an investment, right?

Galen Low:

Absolutely. Yeah. It's funny because you know, like there's all these mindsets around project management and sometimes we don't see all the parallels between different projects, but more life saved is a great return on investments. And I know not a lot of my listeners are working on life or death mission critical projects. A lot of them are, you know, working on healthcare projects that are delivering care or service to folks in need. I do have folks in my network who were involved with vaccine rollouts during the pandemic, and, you know, all the techniques really kind of come out into sharp relief of like why they're important. But then you map that back and you're like, okay, well my projects, like me personally did a lot of like government website projects and I'm like, okay, that's not me. No one's living or dying based on what I do. But one of my verticals was transit, right? Accessible transit using digital technology. And I had never thought of it that way. Do you know what I mean? I was like, budget, we want to come in on budget because that's what we said we'd do. It never occurred to me that more people could ride transit. More easily maybe to get to like a job interview, to get to the hospital, to, you know, it made an impact on lives, and that was never really our metric.

Stephen Devaux:

Absolutely. But I would maintain it. It should be, I'll give you one more that I think a lot of your people may be working in. If they're working in construction, maybe they're working on a hospital. Guess what? That hospital's being built to save lives because it's gonna be closer for an ambulance to get to it or whatever it is. So if that hospital is going to say, even say two lives per week. Think about that. If that hospital winds up taking eight weeks longer than it should, 16 family members just died. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. One of the problems is that project managers really do have a good handle on a lot of these methods, and these methods are brilliant. I'll never forget the time that I first discovered Critical Path Method and I thought, this is great. Why didn't I ever think of this? This is back in 1987. I immediately saw its value and it's a great method and I would never have thought of it on my own. But the fact remains that what these project managers are not being given, if you think about it, is the information about the investment. That's what they've thought to be given. They've got to be given that information by the sponsors, customers, key stakeholders who know what value, what things they want. And what the value of them will be, and they need to do some research on what will the value be if we change the schedule. Because you know, many stakeholders feel that they can finish the project on a given date simply by saying the deadline is October 15th. That's not how it works. If in fact, you want us to finish by October 15th, that is our target date. I hate the term deadline. That is a target date. What I now need to know is how much would it be worth to you if I could finish October 8th, October 1st, or how much loss in value will there be if I finish October 22nd, November 1st, November 8th? So ultimately, if you tell me that, then I can make decisions. And look for opportunities to increase the value or avoid decreasing the value. And I still have a budget here, which I'm not allowed to go over unless you tell me I can. So if I see an opportunity whereby spending an extra$10,000, I can get an acceleration premium based on what you told me of$50,000, then I'm gonna come back to you and say, Hey, see this opportunity here. Would you like to give me 10? Invest $10,000 more because then I can offer you a potential ROI of $50,000.

Galen Low:

I love that it centers around information. You said information from the stakeholders and sponsors, which I definitely agree. And also project managers doing research about how their project delivers impact or how it delivers a return on investment so that they can ask the right questions.

Stephen Devaux:

I've worked for companies where every project manager is told, we want you to look for opportunities, but they never tell them what an opportunity looks like. An opportunity is spending a little more money to provide more value. But the big problem is that even though the project manager level often has a very good understanding of projects, the executives often don't. They don't understand the information that needs to be given, and that if they give that information, what more values should come? One of my great beliefs is that projects ultimately should be part of the responsibilities of the CFO, the chief financial officer. After all, aren't they? The people who decide about investments and fund investments? They too, the PMO in my idealized organization would report to the CFO.

Galen Low:

I really like that. I wondered if we could take this opportunity to just zoom out a little bit because when we first met, we didn't talk about project management right away. We talked about baseball. It was October in 2025, the Jays still had a chance to win the World Series, and you had told me a story about Bill James and his baseball abstracts on which the book and the film Moneyball were based on. I know you love this stuff. So I wanted to ask, who is Bill James? And what's his work got to do with your contributions to the project management craft?

Stephen Devaux:

I grew up in Barbados, my Barbados hack, so I grew up as a huge cricket fan. I moved to the United States when I was 15, and suddenly I couldn't follow cricket anymore because there was no internet in those days. So ultimately I changed to baseball and became a huge baseball fan, and I read every article I could. I looked at the box scores every morning and so on, and then a friend of mine said to me, 1982, Steve, you know, you really ought to read this guy Bill James. I said, who? He said he comes out with this book every spring. You should read. Call the Bill James Baseball Abstract. So next spring, 1982, I was in the stores looking for this when it came out. You can see this book. It's full of numbers and so on. It took me 14 and a half hours to read this book cover to cover from two 30 in the afternoon until five o'clock the next morning. Okay. Nonstop. I learned more in the about baseball in reading that book than I had in decades of following baseball and reading about it, and so I love fell in love with Bill James. I was 1982. In 1987, I was hired to develop courses to underlay project management software with a company that I worked for at that time. And I learned their software. I learned it. I started teaching it. But then about five years later, when I went out on my own and was a consultant and had to do things like plan projects, pulling schedules, I realized that there was stuff that was missing in the software, like critical path drag for pulling in a schedule. Ultimately, over the course of the years, I realized what was missing in the Bill James thing, or what he did was point out stuff that was missing in baseball statistics. So everyone followed batting averages at various things, but he pointed out that in baseball what really matters. Is wins versus losses. And so everything that a player does, whether it's making a good fielding play, stealing a base, or hitting a double, has to be related to how many additional runs. First of all, will that add, and how many wins will the runs act? Everything should be based on wins versus losses. What should it be on a project? And that's where the answer came to me. It should be based on return on investment. Now I wanna say something about this.'cause you said a moment ago about how people are saying all projects are investments. Here's something they are missing though, on a project, we very rarely know exactly what return we are going to get. Just as when the Los Angeles Dodgers signed Mook Bats, they don't know exactly how many wins he is going to add. But they have a feel for it because Bookie bet's career has been basically measured in what is called winds above replacement per season, which is expected winds above replacement that he could be adding in the future. And so in a project, what we need to be doing is not measuring at the end, which is looking at the end of the project, what ROI did it produce. What we have to be doing is looking at the expected ROI or expected project profit, which is something on a project which is impacted by just four things. If you think about it. The three triple constraints scope, which produces the value resource costs, which are what we have to invest to get the value. And when we're gonna get that, just as with every other investment, when we're gonna get the payoff, is very important. Whether it's a three month security or a six month security, right? When are we gonna get that payoff? The same thing is true for a project throw in risks, which can affect any of them, and those are the four things that project managers should be looking at and measuring in integration across these four things. So the value of the scope minus the cost of the resources and the value of the scope should be plus or minus if we deliver earlier or later. Now, I just wanna say one more thing. It was over 20 years before Bill James became popular as a result of this book called Moneyball by Michael Lewis, which came out in 2002, and which talks about Bill James and Billy Bean, the manager of the Oakland Athletics who implemented it, and then in nine years later they made the movie with Brad Pit. Lots of Academy Award nominations, but this movie, for the most part, leaves out the Bill James part of the story. But Bill James had infected me, and I can honestly say that I would not have come up with many of these ideas, if not all, without having Bill James to have led me there. He doesn't know it. If I ever meet him, I will tell him.

Galen Low:

I love that story. And for folks listening and unfamiliar with Bill James' work, what Steve held up and flipped through is an original copy collector's edition, I believe. But you're right, it is all numbers. It is just numbers. And I'm picturing you reading this for, you know, 14 hours straight. And I know a lot of my listeners are, you know, that's torture for them. But I think what I found really interesting about it is. The Bill James philosophy and what you took from it was that there's something missing about what we are actually paying attention to. And if we were to pay attention to that, then we would be able to think about our projects as investments to start predicting, I guess, the expected value. The other thing that I like about it, because I'm gonna make you dive into some of your techniques in a little bit, but the other thing I like about it is that, you know, oftentimes I talk to project managers and they're like, yeah, you know, business impact and business outcomes and ROI, but as soon as the project's done, I'm gone. I don't get to say and measure that impact, but you're actually saying something different. You're like, what actions can we take during a project that will increase the likelihood that we will have an increased return on investment, or that we will hit our target for the impact that we want to have? Even if you roll off after that project, you've done the things, you've asked the right questions, you've said things like, what if we deliver three months later when it intersects with this other project and we save twice as many lives? Or, you know, what actions can we take throughout the project life cycle that are going to, yeah, maybe increase our margins, you know, maybe it'll be more profitable. Maybe we'll help more people in their lives. I like that. It's like you can still influence outcomes within the window of a project. Obviously, I think that there's other projects out there right now where project managers don't roll off. You know, they'll continue on. I think that's probably the right idea. Sometimes it's a portfolio of projects or like an ongoing series of projects, but I do like that notion that even if you're someone who's gonna roll off a project at the end, doesn't mean you can't think of this as an investment.

Stephen Devaux:

Just one thing I wanna say with regard to that, projects are often parts of programs, right? And so we're responsible for developing this new consumer product that's gonna sell everything. It's gonna be wonderful. Greatest thing ever, right? We finish it as fast it could, as could possibly have been done. We come in way under budget and it's got great quality. Then another project within our program, which is the product launch and the marketing involved with a product launch falls absolutely fat on its face. And does a terrible job. Our project doesn't have a good ROI, but it's not our fault. So ultimately, when we are a obey, we are told and should be told what the targets are. We can then show how we exceeded those targets in terms of what the overall value we think we're bringing to it is. But then don't fault us if, for example, right after we produce this wonderful product, either marketing falls apart or COVID hits, right? So there are all kinds of things. Some of them, black swans, unexpected events, but some of them are also part of every program potentially that we have no control of. We're on a program where I'm part of a team. And so, you know, you can't go to Shahe Tani and tell him that despite the fact that he hit 58 home runs and pitched wonderfully. You can't tell him that we do only 1 94 games this season because he did a lousy job. Someone else maybe dropped the ball. Right?

Galen Low:

That's really interesting. I wonder if we can dig in there, because we've been talking about some concepts like value breakdown structures. We've been talking about critical path drag. Fundamentally, we're talking about the mindset and behaviors for managing a project like an investment. I saw you give a talk once and you were talking about, it was a hypothetical scenario with an island resort that was gonna make tons of money, and then there was a bridge involved. I wonder, could we double click into that? I want you to give the context, but I want to double click into this notion that. You might be managing your project like an investment, and aside from the black swans that you can't predict, there may be pieces of the puzzle that your project relies on that you don't have influence over. And I'm wondering if we could go into how you might go about trying to influence some of the things, like to ask the right questions or to get involved with the marketing. But first I wanted you to tell me the the bridge thing.

Stephen Devaux:

The bridge thing actually is something that I am quite excited about, the stuff that I've been doing in it. Because you know when you turn 70, you're not supposed to ever be able to come up with a new idea again. And actually the bridge thing is something that I thought about, occurred to me while the bridge thing and its implications within the last couple of years, and I've been doing a good deal of work on it. Here's the thing, within any program of projects, there are three and I believe only three. Types of projects, types in terms of how they create value. One is a value generator, which could be increasing revenues, saving lives, decreasing costs, right? All of these things are value generators, but then there's a second type of project, which may or may not be generating any value at all, but it's what I call a value enabler, which is that you can't do that second project a value generator until you've done the value enabler. So on the project, the Bridge Project, we're building this wonderful development that's gonna have hotels and luxury restaurants, and a marina and golf courses, all kinds of things for the rich and famous to come and spend their money on. It's gonna bring in millions of dollars in revenues every year. But this development is on an island with very steep sides. And so we have to get the equipment there to build all of these things. And in order to get the equipment there, we're going to have to build a bridge to this little island. If that bridge takes one day longer than it should, our opening three years, hence. Is going to be delayed by one day. If it's a month late, we're losing revenues of a month. So ultimately, the revenues from the hotel, the marina, the golf course, the shops, the stores, everything is riding on this bridge. The faster we get it done, the faster we can start all the others. It's an enabler of several projects. So even though this bridge, you know, if we put a toll booth on it at some point, maybe it'll bring us in a hundred dollars a day or something. Ultimately, it's a hugely valuable project because it's an enabler of four or five other projects. Any delays on it, therefore will delay the projects it's enabling. And where do we want to add resources to get something done faster on the golf course? That'll bring us a little on the shops. On the bridge, which isn't gonna generate any value itself, but it's going to enable all of the value generators. This is really a new concept that people just don't seem to have a sense of. If we can show this, that the value of something, of its time, it can be huge and it can basically justify the resources that are needed to increase the speed to shorten the critical path of the Enabler project.

Galen Low:

I really like that. I'm gonna ask you two questions, one from each side of the fence.'cause I really like the idea that a value enabling project is a storytelling element for every project manager I think about the project, right? And you'd be like, well, I delivered this. On time or early, and as a result, we unlocked this value and this resort or this, you know, the facilities on this island was able to start generating revenue. I think it's a hugely good story. I guess my first question is, if you're leading the Bridge Project, how can you go about advocating for more resources? Maybe I've answered my own question there, but what is the sort of mindset and behavior of the Bridge Project Manager to really make sure that they get the resources they need so that they're asking the right questions and that their project is getting enough attention? Because I'm imagining that sometimes you'll have, you know, your executive sponsor or like executive stakeholders. We'll be like, yeah, that's just the bridge project. Like who cares? We need to do what you said. We need to throw more people and more resource at the golf course 'cause that's going to actually generate revenue. But what can you do as a project manager to say, actually, my project is a value enabler and I think I should have more resources.

Stephen Devaux:

We would like to think that the project manager will go and it will start looking at ROI and increased investment. See where their project fits in with the others. And determine that it's an enabler, and then find out, well, how much revenue all the others are going to produce. Say they can't produce revenues until we get finished. They can't even start producing revenues till we get finished. By the way, there are other projects that are like this. If you think about a platform, save for games, right? A Game Boy type thing. This new game, kids are gonna love this. But ultimately the platform has to get finished first. It's like the Christmas tree, if you will, that we then hang the decorations on. Without the tree, you don't have the decorations. Secondly, the people who are the investors. They have to start realizing that this information has to be, they have to figure it out and they have to give this information to the project teams within the program. And so one of the things that upsets me, that I'm critical of in terms of project management software is there are very few, if any, project management software packages. That right up front in initiating a project say, what is the value of this going to be? And even more important, what is the value or cost of time earlier or later than a target date? If you give the bridge builder, the Game O developer, that information, then all of a sudden they can make decisions and guess what those decisions might include if you give us a fourth bulldozer, we can get this bridge built faster or whatever, or crane, a fifth crane. We can do this three weeks faster and three weeks revenues on this new development are going to be $3.7 million.

Galen Low:

I like that is at the calibration stage, right? It's like when you're setting up your project, do you have this information? It circles back to what you said earlier, is the information needs to be given to a project manager. A project manager needs to gain an understanding of their project, but also the ecosystem of their project so they understand how their project fits within it and how value gets delivered across a program, not just their individual project. Then I like that idea that it should be in the software, it should be in the tools. I mean, maybe that's a good segue because at the time of recording, PMBOK eighth edition is hot off the presses. Everyone's talking about it and talking about mostly the notion that. The idea, the definition of a project is actually changed. So there's a little bit of a mini outcry about that right now. But I also think that you had mentioned the word investment is all over this version. It's a sharp increase from previous versions. It's just mentioned a lot more. This notion of a project that is an investment. Then I'm also thinking about things like, okay, well we're in this era of AI. People are producing more and more tooling to help teams deliver project-based work, whether they're project managers or not. I like that notion that maybe the PMO rests under the CFO, and I'm thinking about that book you just showed me, the Bill James, which is mostly numbers. And I'm just wondering like what in your mind are the implications of treating a project like investment on the human side versus what does this look like through the lens of AI? Like will we have tools that are calculating some of these things for us if we give'em the right information? Or is the onus really on the human to understand these things, to drive those conversations that maybe a tool can't?

Stephen Devaux:

Both are necessary. I think that tools can add a huge amount. AI can add a huge amount. What I would see, for example, for AI to do is the person says to it, to the AI system, how if I had an additional$300,000 to spend this year on this project or this program. What should I spend it on? Which activities, which resources, whatever should I spend it on? And the AI system comes back and tells you, and it tells you if you spend $300,000 in this way. It will result in an additional 1.7 million. You spend it in this way, it'll give you an additional rule, 1.55 million, and I'd like to see the top 10 lists because it may be that the top three or four, for whatever reason, I can't do or I don't wanna do. Maybe one of these resources is just unavailable, but give me a list. And then ultimately I can decide which way to spend best in order to increase the value. But in order to do that, whoever's asking the questions has to understand what the essence of a project is just like Billy being the general manager of the Oland Athletics, had to know what the value was of a given player in terms that Bill James had laid out. By the way, there's one more thing I wanna mention. If you think about it, there's one part of project management that really focuses very much on scope and on value. I would argue that they need to pay more attention to schedule because duration and schedule determines also part of the value. But of course, I'm talking about agile approaches. I was amazed when I first came up with value breakdown structure that agile folks really understood the value of it very quickly, and ultimately this process of enablers. For example, if the next release needs to be an enabler. But that by doing it through an enabler, you wind up getting more value down the road. Then that should be taken into account. So all of these concepts regarding the value of the scope also have, I believe, a great deal of value potential for Agile, and maybe we can get over these battles that have been going on between Agile approaches and predictive approaches.

Galen Low:

You know, I'm glad you mentioned Agile because philosophically the approach is more aligned and has a better understanding of value because it's like in the principles to deliver value to the user or the customer. And so even making the decision to adopt an agile framework still presupposes this notion of, because we want to deliver value, because we have to understand value, we have to prioritize value dynamically, not just at the beginning, not just at the end, but all throughout. And I do like that notion that yes, there are the value enablers. In every user story, you know, in every sprint where it might not seem that impressive when you go until you do your, you know, your sprint review or you're presenting to clients or your stakeholders and they're like, okay, well what did you do? And you're like, well, you know, all the plumbing, all the enterprise architecture bit, you know, all of the API sort of setup. And they're like, great, can you show me? And you're like, no, but we need this. Like, we can't take the next step without it. And that's where the value is. And I think this, it's often such a difficult thing to explain. Until you get someone like yourself, you're very good explaining these concepts in a way that you're like, duh. But I think project managers need to get good at that.

Stephen Devaux:

Absolutely. And of course, let's remember that the enabler coming up with may allow us to have three separate, possibly three separate teams at that point, breaking off and producing three separate modules and deliverables, each of which will now be huge value generators. That enabler allows this.

Galen Low:

I love that. You mentioned there were three types of projects, value generators, value enablers. What's the third?

Stephen Devaux:

Value multipliers, which the other project can occur. Ultimately the generator can occur, but the value multiplier say an advertising campaign. Right. Can add value. We might sell 200,000 widgets without the advertising campaign, but the ultimately, if we launch an advertising campaign at the same time that the widgets are all reduced, we can increase that from 200,000 to 800,000. And of course, projects can be value generators, value enablers, and value multipliers. They're gonna fit into more than one one box.

Galen Low:

That's such a great mindset. I really love that. I wonder if we could round out by looking a bit into the future. Maybe not too deep into the future, but I know we didn't talk too much about it. But when I think about the project management institutes, project management, body of knowledge, the pmbok, when I think about the additions that come out, and yes, there's a lot of hoopla about it, but I do think it's important because it sort of creates these epi stems, these eras or these seasons of project management and the way we look at it. And I know I joked about it before, and you know, you and I, we joked about it in the Green room. The definition even of a project has changed and people are taking issue with the phrasing of a unique context because I think it feels vague. I won't get into that now, but I do think that the fact that some of your work and some of your techniques, and even just the fact that the word investment shows up more in this edition, despite it actually being a shorter body of knowledge, as I understand it, seven and eight were both pretty slim compared to five and six. What does that mean for the future of project management? Obviously we're looking around, we're seeing a lot of like global investments in AI, technology infrastructure. We're seeing more tools like hit the market. We are seeing like higher stakes, like you mentioned, right? Like vaccine rollout for health crises. We are now preparing for that. Things that, you know, we couldn't have predicted. And then meanwhile, there's like all this investment into AI. Everyone's talking about AI bubble potentially popping. What does the future look like? Does any of this sort of change the way we go about looking at our profession? Is it a gradual shift or are we looking at something more sudden where actually the role of the project leader changes dramatically and they have to be thinking about different things?

Stephen Devaux:

I think that there're going to be roles for many people on projects. I think that the program manager and the significant project managers are going to have good roles, and I hope better remunerated roles because I think that schedulers are extremely valuable and ultimately good schedulers need to be better remunerated because boy, are they adding a lot of value. Now, a couple more things. You talked about, is it an AI bubble? Let's remember, the internet was a bubble, the.com bubble, all right? In 2000, I got this from reading Paul Krugman earlier today. As a matter of fact, in the year 2000, the Nasdaq reached a certain level, the.com bubble hit, and it did not get back to that level until 2014. Okay. It took a lot of years to get back to that level, but the internet didn't go away, did it? Or we wouldn't be speaking right now. The inter, ultimately. Mm-hmm. Yes. There was a slowing down and there were things that weren't of value that perhaps drifted by the wayside, but the internet kept growing and will continue growing, and AI may have a setback in terms of investment and maybe. You know, o overvalued at the moment, but we'll see what happens. But here's one thing. Project management is not going to go away. I asked GPT about a month ago how much money is being spent yearly on projects, and it gave me the number of 20 to $30 trillion. Now think about what a 1% or 2% even improvement on that would be. I would maintain, it's going to be more, we can get there, but what I have to say is this, and I think this is important, Rome was not built and wouldn't have been built in that day, even if they'd had critical pass drag and the AI. Right? It takes a while, as Bill james would point out, it takes a while.

Galen Low:

I mean, that's part of the investment and I like looking at it from both sides. You know, on the one hand a lot of money is being invested in projects and there's an opportunity there to have those value multiplier projects, to have those value enabler projects to, you know, deliver more value there. And also if there is some kind of pop, if there is some sort of economic drop in investment. These skills, the things we're talking about become even more important because you need to be able to talk about your project in terms of why it's valuable and there's less money available, you know, and it's not like, can we throw another bulldozer at it? It's like we've only got one bulldozer now and eight projects. Who gets the bulldozer? And you're like me, because I'm a value enabler and building the bridge to the resort. Everyone else is just building the stuff on it. Just to be able to have that mindset, to understand the context of your project and to be able to advocate for yourself. About how your project delivers value within the bigger ecosystem. I think that's like a hugely important skill. And what I also love about it's what you said is like the technology piece. Yeah. It's still both. Humans still need to understand it. You as a human project manager still need to understand your project, its context, you know, the business implications of your project and the levers you can pull to be able to make decisions that increase the return on investment. Also we can use our tools to simulate and give ourselves that top 10. If we were to pull this lever, if we were to invest an extra $30,000, what could that look like? And instead of, you know, running all of our Monte Carlo simulations like in a corner, you know, we've got AI enhanced tools. Hopefully the notion of critical bath drag get built into more pieces of software. The value breakdown structures. Hopefully that'll get added into more software suites as well, so that we have this mechanism to be almost continuously evaluating where there might be some opportunity to sharpen that return on investment to amplify and to multiply the value that our projects deliver.

Stephen Devaux:

I think this is such an exciting time for projects and project managers, and I mentioned about the 20 to$30 trillion a year in projects. Do you know what the annual budget is for? Professional baseball worldwide? About $40 billion. So we can do even more than Bill James did.

Galen Low:

I love that. Steve, thank you so much. This has been so much fun. Just for giggles, do you have a question that you wanna ask me?

Stephen Devaux:

Yes. I love The Digital Project Manager. So what do you want the future of the Digital Project Manager to be?

Galen Low:

As an organization or as a role?

Stephen Devaux:

You tell me, both.

Galen Low:

As a role, I think that technology's becoming a huge piece of social infrastructure and the way we live. I think the savviness, the curiosity to understand how a project sits within a technical ecosystem, a political ecosystem, a business ecosystem. I want that to be the role I want it to be about. Looking into that crystal ball a little bit. No one has one. But the risk management aspect of things. The what if, and driving those conversations that are ultimately creative conversations to be like, what if we did this? Could this help avoid a negative risk? Could this help amplify the value of a project? And really steering in that direction of being leaders, not just taking orders and delivering. As an organization, we wanna be able to support that. We know that AI is transforming things. We know that a lot of the projects of that, you know, X trillion dollars are about organizations morphing, changing their DNA completely to adapt to things like AI and other disruptive technologies. And we wanna be able to enable and help project managers and anyone who's at the helm of any project make good decisions so that we aren't looking at these headlines going, oh ha, 95% of AI projects, you know, will fail. Or 80% of agentic pilots are not working. And not looking at it at that direction, looking at it through the lens of how might we be able to either succeed more by, you know, putting more rigor behind these projects. Or how can we understand what we're learning when we're failing?'cause failing is not always bad. Failing is how we learn. That's how we come up with these ideas. And we've been talking about, you know, you mentioned earlier like critical path originally, not something you would've thought of. Not something I would've thought of. But by doing projects over and sharing knowledge, this is how we arrive at better ways to do things. And this is how we arrive at more success through projects, and that's ultimately leaping us forward. That's the way I see it.

Stephen Devaux:

That's wonderful. And good luck to you and please contact me anytime you have a, that something comes up that you think would, I would be interested in or I might have an answer for. I, I will definitely be in touch. This has been really insightful. I always learn a lot when we talk to one another. I know we could go on for days. There's a load of things that I think I'd love to have you back to discuss. But yeah, let's wrap it there for now. Thank you so much.

Galen Low:

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Galen.

Stephen Devaux:

That's it for today's episode of The Digital Project Manager Podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to subscribe wherever you're listening. And if you want even more tactical insights, case studies and playbooks, head on over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com. Until next time, thanks for listening.