Go-live day goes well. The forward deployed engineer walks the sponsor through the system, leadership thanks the team, and two weeks later the vendor’s people roll off to their next customer. Three months after that, the AI’s answers start drifting. A vendor update changes how a feature behaves. A second business unit wants in. And […]
What Is a Forward Deployed Engineer? A Guide for HR, L&D and PMO Leaders
If your organization is buying enterprise AI in 2026, a vendor has probably offered you a forward deployed engineer, or will soon. The title sounds like an engineering detail. It isn’t. An FDE sits inside your organization, shapes how your teams work with a new AI system, and then leaves when the engagement ends. That […]
Elite Teams Are Small and Fast: What Skunk Works and a Vaccine Taught Us About Agile Project Management
Project managers with a forty-person team and a two-hundred-line schedule: the fastest project teams in history were small enough to fit in one room. That wasn’t a budget constraint they worked around. It was the strategy. This is the second post in our Elite Teams series. The first covered the trait every elite team shares. […]
Will AI Replace Project Managers? An Honest 2026 Answer
No — AI is not replacing the project manager role. It is absorbing the administrative layer of the job: status reports, schedule drafts, risk flagging, meeting notes. Accountability, judgment under ambiguity, stakeholder trust, and change leadership remain human work. The project managers at risk are not being replaced by AI — they are being replaced […]
How Long to Study for the New PMP Exam?
Plan for roughly 60–120 focused hours of PMP® preparation. For most working professionals that means 8–12 weeks at 8–10 hours a week, or 12–14 weeks at a steadier 6 hours a week. Experienced PMs with agile exposure land near the low end; candidates newer to agile or to the Business Environment domain should budget the […]