Project management frameworks have never been more popular. Agile, Waterfall, hybrid models, scaled variants, maturity models. Each promises structure, clarity, and predictability. Each has advocates, certifications, and tooling ecosystems built around it. And yet, projects continue to fail at a familiar rate. The problem isn’t that frameworks are useless.
For decades, projects have been judged by two simple measures: on time and on budget. Those phrases still dominate board papers, media commentary, and post-project reviews. They sound objective. Reassuring. Definitive. They are also deeply misleading. A project can be delivered on time and on budget and still fail in
Ask a project team who is accountable for a decision and you’ll often get silence, a job title, or a steering committee. Rarely do you get a name. That gap between responsibility and accountability is where many projects quietly unravel. On paper, accountability is everywhere. RACI charts. Governance diagrams.
When projects fail publicly, it often looks sudden. A blowout. A cancellation. A missed deadline that finally can’t be explained away. Inside the project, it is almost never sudden. Most delivery failures are visible well before they become official. They appear first as small compromises, delayed decisions, and quiet
Project reporting has never been more polished, and rarely been less useful. Most organisations produce an extraordinary volume of project information. Dashboards, status reports, traffic lights, forecasts, variance explanations. Everything is measured, categorised, and packaged. And yet, when projects derail, very few people are genuinely surprised. That contradiction tells you
Project management in 2026 isn’t broken, but it is widely misunderstood. A lot of the conversation still revolves around tools, templates, certifications, and frameworks. Those things have their place, but they are rarely where projects succeed or fail. The reality is that projects today are delivered in environments that
Ben Webb is an Australian Project Manager with more than two decades of experience delivering complex projects and programs across infrastructure, tourism, transport, hospitality, and the public sector. He was named Australian Institute of Project Management (AIPM) Australian Project Manager of the Year (2022) and nominated for IPMA World Project