Agile and Project Management - DrunkenPM Radio

Drunken PM Radio is a long-running show about agile and project management that has quietly become several things at once. Its core is the interview. Dave Pryor, who describes thirty years across traditional project management and agile coaching, sits down with people who have built something or written something and asks how it works in practice. Richard Broo unpacks troubled projects: what makes one, how it got that way, and what can be done. Evan Campbell walks through a framework for overcoming strategy decay with OKRs and lean portfolio management, illustrated with a steel thread running down the organization and a flotilla of canoes where one crew paddles enthusiastically toward the rocks. Marina Alex tells the story of a client whose teams she reorganized into self-managing units, freeing the owner to go back to the work she actually wanted to do. The details are specific enough to argue with. That matters, because a lot of this space traffics in slogans. A second strand runs under the name Surfing Chaos, an audio newsletter Pryor makes with Stuart Young. It is deliberately short. The stated design is for busy brains and moving feet, and each edition moves through a product recommendation, a trends slot called throwing bones, and some closing thought on craft. One episode lands on visual thinking as a communication enabler, the idea being that words and pictures work when they resonate with a belief system the listener already holds. Another chews on which skills AI will automate and which it will augment, reaching for a driverless car versus driver assist comparison and noting the trap of leaning too hard on the assist. There is talk of employers shifting toward incremental certificates over long degrees. Running underneath everything recently is an open question Pryor keeps putting to listeners: what is the role of a project manager in an organization heavily invested in AI? He does not pretend to have the answer. A guest raises the related worry that people paste a question into a chatbot without the qualifiers, treat the output as a single data point, and never check it against anything the organization has actually done before. The show also lets in the awkward parts of professional life, including a frank stretch about how hard finding a gig has been even with decades of experience. Tone is loose, warm, occasionally self-deprecating, with sign-offs that undercut any pretense of polish. There is a spinoff, Systems of Imperfection, created by Pryor and Young in support of their book No One Is Coming to Save You, whose first episode features Olivia Vick talking through how she breaks large tasks into mini steps to keep anxiety at bay. Anyone who has run a delivery knows that instinct. The show suits people who work in this field rather than people studying it, and it assumes the listener already knows what a retrospective is.