The Fiduciary Project Manager

A programme manager I will call Maggie, a composite though anyone who has spent a decade in delivery will recognise her, steered a platform migration through three sponsors, two reorganisations and one uncomfortable meeting in which she declined to confirm a go-live date. The migration landed, more or less intact, several months after the third sponsor had moved on to a larger title elsewhere, and the slide announcing its success carried his name, which Maggie understood perfectly well and resented far less than she had expected to. What stayed with her was not the credit but a quieter question about who she had actually been working for all that time, and whether there was a way of answering it that did not leave her career at the mercy of other people’s timetables.

I want to explore a word “Fiduciary” which has a precise legal meaning. Practitioners are right to point out that it is generally considered misleading to apply it to project managers outside situations where they control funds. For the purposes of this post, I mean it in the moral sense, in which a person is entrusted with something that belongs to someone else and owes their loyalty to that thing rather than to whoever happened to hand it over.

The profession has not ignored the idea; stewardship is the first of the twelve principles in the PMBOK Guide’s seventh edition. Stewardship theory assumes that managers believe their own standing improves when the organisation’s performance improves, and the fiduciary project manager is a case in point. The fiduciary project manager, in other words, is not a martyr but someone who believes that if they diligently do their job as if it was their own resources, the company will be successful and their effort will be rewarded.

Executive time horizons.

The trouble is the horizon. Chief Technology Officer (CTO) tend to spend three to five years in a role, against five to seven for chief executives and finance directors, and nearly 40% of CIOs in one survey had been in post two years or less, while more than half of technology executives changed employer in a single year. It would be easy to read this as ambition, and sometimes it is, but the pressures are real: expectations that outrun what legacy estates can bear. There is a cost-centre mentality that asks for annual reductions in IT spend. The uncomfortable result is that the people who sponsor the longest-running work are often the people least likely to be there when it lands, and the fiduciary PM is usually the one left carrying the responsibility.

Two things can then happen: The first is that the steward (the fiduciary PM) becomes invisible, because outcomes are often attributed to the team or the result itself while attention arrives suddenly when things go wrong. The second is that honesty gets expensive.

Professor Bent Flyvbjerg who is known as the world’s leading project management scholar, has identified the personal biases to avoid if you want to stay on time and on budget. The fiduciary project manager is typically the person telling emperor he is not wearing any clothes and bringing to light fallacies that the CTO may have been led astray by. Flyvbjerg and his colleagues found heavy political pressure on executives to produce rosy forecasts which then face only minor penalties when those forecasts proved wrong, which helps explain why honesty can feel like the expensive option. A PM who is being a good steward will sooner or later say something unwelcome. What that costs them depends almost entirely on the environment around them, which is the part I think we underuse.

The Fiduciary challenge.

None of this is fixed, though. The environment around a steward is not a given but something that can be built, at least at the margins, and a fiduciary PM has more room to shape it than the invisibility and expense described above might suggest. A fiduciary PM can make stewardship legible by reporting benefits and risk rather than activity. Visibility isn’t about promoting yourself, it’s about promoting clarity.

• The fiduciary PM can sponsor-proof the work by building belief beyond the sponsor and agreeing an escalation path before it is needed, and by keeping a decision log that a successor can read in an afternoon.
• The fiduciary PM can cut long-horizon value into tenure-sized increments, so that an incoming executive inherits something they can honestly present as progress without the long game being mortgaged for it.
• The fiduciary PM can make truth cheaper by anchoring baselines in reference data and inviting independent assurance. The key point being that the message does not depend on one person’s nerve.

This matters because Flyvbjerg’s view is that method alone will not prevent misrepresentation without incentives. A fiduciary PM can also recognise that a new executive’s first hundred days create demand for exactly what a steward holds: an honest account of what is real, what is fragile and why. Offered freely, that briefing is one of the fastest credibility trades in the building, and everybody in it is better off.

None of this is guaranteed; some organisations simply won’t reward any of it. The evidence that companies with longer-tenured executive teams outperformed on revenue and customer experience suggests some environments are simply more hospitable to stewards, and choosing where to practise is part of the craft. But I suspect the more useful question for most of us is smaller and closer to hand: in the project you are running this quarter, who is the beneficiary, and what would it take for serving them to be the visible, defensible and sustainable thing to do?

It’s also worth being honest about where this can go wrong. Stewardship can curdle into inertia, and a PM who is really just defending an inherited decision is not serving the outcome at all, whatever they tell themselves. It can become its own trap, too, if all the continuity lives in one head rather than in something a successor could pick up — which is exactly why transferability, not indispensability, has to be part of the design from the start.

In summary what can a fiduciary PM actually do?

The habits that protect the project and the habits that build a career turn out to be much the same. Both depend on the people who decide being able to see what is really happening. In practice, that comes down to a handful of moves.

To deliver the programme

1. Name the beneficiary on day one. Write one line saying who the project is for and what changes for them. Ideally, get that benefit owned by someone in a lasting role, not just the sponsor, and test big decisions against it.
2. Baseline honestly. Reference class forecasting replaces the subjective judgements of project promoters with data from similar projects, so your estimates rest on evidence rather than on your nerve. 
3. Agree how bad news travels before there is any. Flyvbjerg’s remedies include governance with early-warning systems that capture and act on things that go wrong. Set triggers and escalation routes up front, so raising a problem is a routine step and not a personal confession. 
4. Sponsor-proof the work. Build support beyond one person, agree an interim sponsor, and keep a decision log a successor can read in an afternoon.
5. Deliver in tenure-sized steps. Break long-term value into increments an incoming executive can honestly present as progress, without trading away the long game.

To progress in your career

• Report outcomes, not effort. Senior stakeholders care less about how busy you are and more about what has changed as a result of your work. Short decision notes also help, because they make how you think visible to the people who promote you.
• Be the continuity a new leader needs. In their first hundred days, offer an honest briefing on what is real, what is fragile and why.
• Build relationships beyond your sponsor. Your standing shouldn’t leave the building when they do.
• Keep a portable track record. A simple ledger of decisions made, risks retired and benefits delivered is useful in this role and the next.
• Choose your ground. If an organisation repeatedly punishes honesty, moving on is part of looking after your own career as a steward.

None of this guarantees success. What it does is make the truth easy to see and hard to ignore, which is the best available basis for both a successful project and a credible career. It comes back, in the end, to the question I asked a few paragraphs ago: in the project you are running this quarter, who is the beneficiary, and what would it take for serving them to be the visible, defensible and sustainable thing to do? The habits above are simply what answering it honestly tends to require.