Adrian Pyne

Head of governance, MyMelanoma

Adrian is above all a project professional. He has led or rescued transformation programmes widely from Telcos to eCommerce, Finance. Mining, Aviation, and the public sector. He has designed, built and operated P3 (project, programme and portfolio management) capability, PMOs, and professional services businesses.

His key skill is the adaptation of best practice successfully. In the last ten years his consultancy has focused on two areas. Firstly, what he and colleagues call Organisational Project Management, the creation of an organisation culture that enables projects to thrive and not merely survive, or even die. Secondly, on Agile Project Management which too many organisations get badly, and expensively, wrong.

Currently helping to establish a new cancer research organisation, Adrian has joined MyMelanoma as its head of governance.

Adrian is a Fellow of the Association for Project Management (APM), an APM RPP Assessor and was a member of APM’s Audit Committee. Adrian has been active in APM for over 30 years, being heavily involved in the evolution of programme and portfolio management, PMOs, stakeholder and agile project management. He is also a strong advocate of diversity within the profession.

He has contributed to UK government standards for programme and portfolio management and PMOs, APM Body of Knowledge, and co-authored the Gower Handbook of Programme Management (1st edition), plus APM guides on Agile Governance and Assurance.

He is currently writing a book on agile project management, showing how it both can be, and is being used well beyond the realm of IT agile software development projects, e.g. using scrum, on which most guides focus. Adrian says he will also show that agile projects can have any life-cycle they need.

Adrian remains a frequent speaker around APM and elsewhere, including internationally, and is a visiting lecturer at Nottingham and Southampton University Business Schools, He is also a regular blogger, and he says, is still learning.

Adrian believes that true project professionals, being great adapters are agile by their very nature. They succeed less through governance, but rather by getting people to do what they need to, at all levels. Because of that he says that our profession’s future lays not so much in AI nor governance or assurance, but in its people.

Presentation Synopsis - AI and projects – Terminator or flight of the navigator?

Information has always been central to the management of projects. PM tools to date have not made much difference to overall project performance – according to regular reports from PMI Pulse of the Profession, Gartner, Standish, Forrester, APM and so on.

AI has the potential to make a difference, adding considerable value to projects and project managers.

AI also has the potential to put project management back 30 years to process based working, when people did not figure in the profession, other than for roles and responsibilities.

This session examines how AI can be brought to the service of people and projects, rather than the other way around.