Project Manager

Know the date is slipping while you can still do something about it.

Your Project Manager owns the plan, not the work. It breaks a job into pieces someone can actually finish, puts a name and a date on each one, and works out which chain of those pieces decides when the whole thing lands. That chain is the difference between a task being late and a project being late, and most businesses find out which they had only at the end.

It finds the stuck thing every morning. A task nobody can start because someone else has not finished, an approval sitting in a queue, a part that has not shipped. It takes each one to the person who can clear it with a single message, and it counts the days each blocker has cost.

It will not tell you a project is fine when it is not. The status is set by the numbers: how many days behind, how far over, how much of the critical path is done. A project that has been green for three weeks while the slip grows every week gets called out, because the alternative is a surprise.

Nothing gets absorbed. When someone asks for one more thing, it writes down what was asked, works out what it costs in days and money and what it pushes back, and puts that in front of whoever can say yes or no. Small changes are how a fixed-price job quietly becomes a loss.

It closes properly. Before a project is done it proves each deliverable exists, catches the work that was never billed, and writes down what the estimate got wrong so the next one is closer.

You get one page a week per project: the date you promised, the date it is now, the difference and why, and the two decisions that are yours.