The Cheeky PM - Metrics Do Matter

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Oct 5, 2026

The Cheeky PM. They Made EVM Optional. Then Everyone Went to a Baseball Stadium to Talk About It.

The Lab has been closed for a month. In that time, the Department of War signed a memo that narrows mandatory earned value management, retired the separate EVMS validation regime, and started a 180-day clock. Ava read all of it and Barkley guarded the folder. This week the whole industry meets at Nationals Park at the Project Controls Expo to talk about AI, and almost nobody is talking about the thing that actually changed.

Sep 7, 2026

The Cheeky PM. Your Numbers Already Know How This Ends. And It Isn't Good.

Inside the Cheeky PM Lab, real metrics and real outcomes matter, but curiosity drives every experiment. This week Barkley finally files the cost report that keeps getting bumped, and it turns out the whole AI industry needed to read it first. We open the CPI trend line your green dashboard has been quietly hiding, the decades-old research behind it, and seven fixes you can run on your own cost data this week.

Aug 24, 2026

The Cheeky PM. Your Growth Plan Had a Single Point of Failure. LinkedIn Just Found It.

Inside the Cheeky PM Lab, real metrics and real outcomes matter, but curiosity drives every experiment. This week Ava audits the platform most of us stopped watching closely, and Barkley discovers the loophole he has been happily exploiting for a year just got patched. If you have ever typed "link in the first comment," this one is for you.

Aug 17, 2026

The Cheeky PM. AI Is Eating Project Controls Consulting. Here Is When to Feed It and When to Pull It Back.

Inside the Cheeky PM Lab, real metrics and real outcomes matter, but curiosity drives every experiment. With Ava, our practical PM in a lab coat, and her surprisingly perceptive Rough Collie Barkley running signal detection, this week we chase the loudest story in the industry: a services giant just paid a reported $390 million for an AI engineer, while the people actually building AI agents are quietly warning that most of that spend is wasted. Both are true. Here is how a working practitioner tells the difference.

Aug 3, 2026

The Cheeky PM. Only 2% of Owners Trust the Schedule. Here Is the 20-Minute Check That Earns It Back.

Inside the Cheeky PM Lab, real metrics and real outcomes matter, but curiosity drives every experiment. With Ava, our practical PM in a lab coat, and her surprisingly perceptive Rough Collie Barkley guiding the work, this week we run a diagnostic on the one asset every project produces and almost nobody believes: the schedule.

Jul 20, 2026

The Cheeky PM. Three Seats at the Bench. The Lean AI Stack That Actually Earns Its Keep.

Inside the Cheeky PM Lab, real metrics and real outcomes matter, but curiosity drives every experiment. With Ava, our practical PM in a lab coat, and her surprisingly perceptive Rough Collie Barkley guiding the work, this week we deliver on last issue's promise. The audit is done, the freeloaders are gone, and what is left on the bench are the tools that genuinely earn their keep for a project controls professional.