John McIntyre
Founder, HotPMO
Every month I trawl through the research papers, reports, and podcasts so you don’t have to. Here’s what caught my eye this month.
July has a people flavour to it. The news covers who gets into the profession when AI takes the admin, how project managers learn the job, what neurodivergent practitioners need from the way we design work, and who vouches for you when promotion time comes. Alongside that, new research takes apart the idea that small projects are the safe ones, and Whitehall’s delivery authority shows what deliberate focus looks like.
Who gets the first rung of the ladder?
The World Economic Forum and PwC published a framework on AI and the future of entry-level work in late June. The problem is familiar to anyone who has hired a PMO administrator lately: the repetitive, admin-heavy tasks that junior roles are built around are exactly the tasks AI absorbs first. The WEF’s answer is to redesign those roles rather than quietly delete them. Plan the workforce deliberately, open apprenticeship routes alongside the graduate one, and keep giving juniors real work that builds judgement and confidence, with the ability to challenge AI outputs treated as a core skill in its own right.
Lindsay picked this one out on the stream, and her angle stuck with me. She got into the profession through temping, and she worries about where the next generation of PMO talent will come from if that kind of first rung disappears. Her question is the one worth sitting with: if you brought an apprentice into your PMO next week, what would they do?
Try answering it on paper: write down a week of work for a junior analyst once the report-chasing is automated. If the page stays blank, that is a workforce planning gap, better found now than at succession time.
Learning on the job, and who vouches for you
The APM’s first Project Management Skills Survey, run with YouGov, reports that 59% of project managers primarily learn on the job, that only around a quarter hold entry-level project management qualifications, and that relatively few go on to deep expertise. APM’s own conclusion is that relying on experience alone can produce inconsistency. The full report is reserved for APM Corporate Partners, so the rest of us are working from the public headlines.
Eileen’s reaction on the stream was the practical one: our plans quietly assume an expert working at their best throughout, so where is the estimate that carries a risk multiplier when the project manager is learning as they go? She would be fascinated to meet the planner who adds one.
PMI has also refreshed the PMP exam for July 2026. The new exam content outline rebalances the domains to People 33%, Process 41% and Business Environment 26%, shifts the question mix to roughly 40% predictive and 60% adaptive or hybrid, and introduces case-study and graphic-based question types. PMI names AI and sustainability as the drivers, which fits the direction I covered in June’s roundup when its AI standard landed.
King’s College London ties the careers thread together, with research by Dr Madeleine Wyatt of King’s Business School and Professor Elena Doldor of Queen Mary University of London, published in the Academy of Management Journal, on how people reach leadership roles. They argue sponsorship should sit with leadership as a responsibility rather than an informal favour. They describe four kinds of sponsorship relationship (assigned, resistant, shallow and reciprocal, in the paper’s terms) and find that fewer than one in four are the reciprocal kind that moves a career. Lindsay’s observation on the stream: our community talks a great deal about mentors and coaches, and almost never about sponsors.
At your next development conversation, ask who is sponsoring the person as well as who is advising them. A mentor helps you think; a sponsor says your name in rooms you are not in.
Neurodiversity is a work-design question now
The third Neurodiversity in Business research report, written with Birkbeck, University of London, surveyed 605 people: 428 neurodivergent employees, 122 neurodivergent entrepreneurs and 55 employer representatives. Three quarters of the employees work hybrid. Nearly four in ten had received a return-to-office mandate, and over half of those said it made them reconsider staying. And psychological safety, the strongest protection against burnout in the data, has not improved since the 2024 report even though line manager support and work-life balance have.
The idea I took away is job crafting: letting people reshape the tasks they do, the way they think about the work, and the relationships around it, rather than requiring the person to fit the role exactly as written. In the report’s analysis of what drives engagement, the opportunity to job craft mattered nearly four times as much as psychological safety.
The report’s four principles for good practice, recreated in HotPMO style from Figure 14 of the Neurodiversity in Business Research Report 2026 (Birkbeck, University of London, with Neurodiversity in Business).
This one came up in the PMO HotHouse news slot, and it started one of the better chat conversations: a PMO practitioner on the call talked about how well PMO work can suit a neurodivergent mind. Which PMO tasks play to which strengths is a question our field has never properly mapped.
If your organisation is debating a blanket return-to-office mandate, the PMO’s flexible working patterns are worth defending, and this report hands you the evidence. Then ask each member of your team which parts of their role they would reshape if they could. On this data, the answer drives engagement more than almost anything else you control.
Small is not the same as safe
If small projects sit at the comfortable end of your portfolio’s risk register, a new preprint, Is Complexity Theory Right that Bigger Is Riskier? Evidence from Information Technology by Fioralba Ajazi and colleagues including Bent Flyvbjerg, says the comfort is misplaced. Across 5,094 IT projects, size was a poor predictor of cost risk, and the smallest projects fared worst of all: a mean cost overrun of 192%, against 57% for the largest group. Control for country and year and typical overrun falls steadily as projects get bigger.
The tails are the uncomfortable part. For the smallest projects the overrun distribution is so fat-tailed that the authors class it as what Mandelbrot called wild risk: no stable mean, no stable variance, and extreme blowouts arriving as a standing feature of the population rather than freak events. Their governance point: budget thresholds are a poor trigger for assurance attention, and exempting small projects from review, as some governments now do, looks away from exactly where the wildest risk lives.
Gernot Grabher’s retrospective in Project Management Journal, Seeing Like an Ecology, makes a good companion piece. His argument is that a project is never the self-contained temporary organisation our governance documents pretend it is. Every project operates inside a project ecology of six interconnected layers:
- Team: where the work happens; temporary by design, yet it forges reputations and knowledge that outlive it.
- Firm: hosts projects rather than commanding them, and acts as the selective memory between them.
- Epistemic collective: the task-specific mix of in-house people, clients and suppliers who argue their way to shared knowledge.
- Personal network: carries experience, trust and reputation from one project to the next.
- Locality: the place and scene around the work, where visibility to peers and rivals shapes behaviour.
- Institution: the professional norms and standards that let strangers coordinate without a central controller.
Layer names as printed in Grabher, G. (2026), ‘Seeing Like an Ecology: Project Ecologies as Prism, Practice, and Provocation’, Project Management Journal, published online 1 July 2026.
The phrase of his that stays with me is “learning in projects, remembering in networks”. Projects deliver outputs; whether any capability survives once the team disbands depends on the layers around them. That reading is mine rather than the paper’s, and it is why I think a paper that never mentions PMOs matters to us. Much of what Grabher describes as ecology maintenance is work a good PMO quietly does.
Two checks follow. Pull your assurance thresholds and ask what earns scrutiny; if the answer is budget alone, the overrun data above says you are watching the wrong signal. Then take a project that closed last quarter and ask where its knowledge lives today. If the answer is “in the people who left”, you have met the amnesia Grabher spent twenty years writing about.
Whitehall now watches fewer projects on purpose
NISTA published its first Major Projects Annual Report on 13 July: 189 projects on the Government Major Projects Portfolio as at the end of March, carrying a whole-life cost of £924.2 billion. Two decisions in it interest me more than the totals. NISTA has built an Early Warning System that uses the GMPP data it already collects to flag projects at risk of sliding into a red delivery-confidence rating. And in April it refocused the portfolio to roughly 80 of the most complex and strategically important projects, so support goes where it is needed most. The portfolio held 227 projects in March 2024; next year’s report will cover around 80. Watching fewer things properly is the right instinct.
Konstantin Lagutin’s paper in PM World Journal pushes the same instinct into the private sector, arguing the PMO should be reframed as an investment protection system whose job is to “help leadership commit capital with greater confidence, surface risk earlier, validate readiness more rigorously, and improve the quality of decisions before value leakage becomes irreversible”. The paper is content-light on how, but I like the mission framing, and it would sit comfortably over NISTA’s Early Warning System too.
PMI’s blog, meanwhile, went behind the project management of NASA’s Artemis II mission, where Shawn Quinn coordinated more than 3,000 people across NASA and its contractors. The through-line is a culture where problems get raised early and without blame, which is the same psychological-safety lesson the Birkbeck report reached by a very different route.
The check to run: NISTA built its risk radar from data it was already collecting. Before your PMO bids for a new tool, ask what your existing monthly returns could flag if someone interrogated them properly.
Autumn: worth leaving your desk for
5 and 6 October, online: the two-day Resource Management and the PMO course runs in the House of PMO’s virtual classroom. Eileen appealed on the stream for feedback on what would make this course land for you; if resource management is your standing headache, consider that your cue.
16 and 17 November, Edinburgh: the PMO Insight Conference comes to the EICC, two days on building the decision-enabling PMO, moving from reporting to insight. Lindsay described the format on the stream as a departure from the June London conference: interactive, hands-on and built around data and decisions. The full timetable is due in early August.
You can watch the full session, including the news segment all of this came from, right here:
This roundup is based on my monthly PMO News segment from the PMO HotHouse, run by the House of PMO. If you’re not already part of that community, it’s well worth a look.
If July’s news has a thread, it is that PMO capability gets built on purpose: entry roles that still teach, sponsors who advocate, work designed for the people doing it, and memory that outlasts the project. The PMO SuccessHub exists to help PMO teams do that building month after month. Come and have a look around.
