Like it or not, the market is renegotiating the role of a Project Manager, with AI accelerating the discussion. The temporary nature of the role (where a PM leaves at the end of a project to start a new one) may be the first thing to go. Are we ready for that?
A few weeks ago, I wrote that the influence-without-authority model might be past its expiration date. I suggested that if the project manager role survives (and I think it will), it will outsource much of its tactical, coordinating responsibilities to AI and become a more empowered decision-maker—someone who makes real calls about how a project is delivered and what scope changes are approved, answering to an executive team rather than a functional sponsor.
One strand of pushback I found really compelling, and I want to address it this week: “You can’t give PMs real decision rights because they’re not around to live with the results.”
It’s a totally reasonable objection.
But it’s based on how project management works today.
Five years from now, the profession will look different. Possibly very different.
Today, the project ends, the PM moves on, and whatever happens with the deliverable afterward belongs to somebody else. The sponsor owns the P&L. Giving decision rights to people who’ll be gone before the consequences land looks a lot like moral hazard.
But what if the “temporariness” of the PM role isn’t a given? I think that’s worth questioning. And like it or not, the market already is.
Every Assumption Is Up for Grabs
We’re in a moment where nothing about how this profession works should be taken for granted. Not the role definition, not the career path, not the best practices, not the credentials. Every assumption the profession has inherited from the last twenty years is up for renegotiation, and AI is compressing the timeline.
In a moment like this, imagination is a survival skill.
The PMs who thrive won’t be the ones who predict the future correctly. They’ll be the ones who can game out multiple scenarios, question base assumptions, and ask “what if that isn’t true anymore?” without flinching.
So let’s try it. Strip project management down to the studs and ask: if my organization got rid of every PM tomorrow, how would it execute on its strategic objectives?
- Would “projects” continue to be distinct from “operations?”
- Who would they hire to do the work?
- What roles survive, what new ones are created?
- Who would have decision-making power? And how much?
- How would humans and AI divide the labor?
- How does information get processed, shared, and analyzed?
This isn’t an abstract exercise. Outside the profession, business leaders are already answering these questions, and they’re not thumbing through the PMBOK when they do it.
They’re solving a practical problem:
How to get work done faster, smarter, and with more discipline, and how to structure teams so decisions land with the people best positioned to make them well.
They’ll land on answers the profession wouldn’t have predicted and probably won’t recognize as “project management.” Some already exist under labels like Product Owner, Portfolio Manager, and Value Stream Owner. Others are being invented in real time, in shops that care more about solving the problem than honoring the definitions.
The first assumption worth questioning is that a project manager is temporary. That’s not a new challenge. It started at least 20 years ago, when Scrum ditched the PM role and replaced it with Product Owners and Scrum Masters, with semi-stable teams organized (generally) around products rather than projects.
I think it’s possible we’re about to see an acceleration of this trend, even in orgs that mostly do waterfall projects. Here’s why.
What Happens When Project Managers Aren’t Around for the Project Result?
The design of the PM role assumes the person in it won’t be around for the payoff. So we evaluate them on what can be measured at closeout: scope, schedule, and budget. Whatever happens 18 months later—adoption rates, realized value, whether the system does what the business case promised—belongs to somebody else.
Systems get what they reward.
If the only thing you’re measured on is whether you hit the date and the number, you’ll make decisions that protect the date and the number.
You’ll cut testing when the schedule slips. You’ll squeeze adoption work when the budget tightens. You’ll trim change management. You’ll ship something that passes UAT and move on, because what the scorecard measures is UAT-pass. Realized value is somebody else’s worry by then.
It would be nice to think that good PMs push back against this, but the 2025 PMI Pulse of the Profession report on business acumen makes it hard to believe they do at scale. The research found that PMs with high business acumen outperform on schedule, budget, and realized value—and that a startlingly low number of PMs have the business acumen they need. If most PMs don’t have the literacy to see the incentive trap, the incentive wins.
The cost of that design doesn’t land on the PM. It lands on the business unit eighteen months later, when adoption comes in below expectations. The PM’s name is on a different project by then.
PMI’s own research on benefits realization identifies “accountability for benefits is misplaced” as one of the top challenges named by PMO leaders, which is precisely the structural problem the temporary model creates. The incentive trap isn’t a character flaw. It’s a design flaw.
It’s easy to look at that dynamic and conclude the PM should stay longer. But that’s still thinking inside the temporary frame. The real question is whether it’s possible and valuable to have projects (temporary efforts) without temporary project managers.
What Can Waterfall PMOs Learn from Agile’s Product Owner Model?
Agile teams tend to have a permanent or semi-permanent configuration, organized to deliver continuous value within a product, for a user group, or within a value stream. That includes project work (temporary effort) but often includes other work too—small improvements, micro-projects, resolution of technical debt, and so on.
While specific team members may change, a Product Owner role sticks around to measure success, make adjustments, and decide on future priorities. The team always has a Scrum Master to support its continuous improvement. Developers and testers tend to stick around longer, building long-term relationships with users or business areas that make the work go faster.
(It’s worth noting that Agile’s lesson here is ambiguous. Scrum didn’t create a permanent version of the PM role—it dissolved it into two distinct functions, neither of which is called a project manager, and then ditched some PM functions completely. That’s either a cautionary tale or a proof of concept, depending on your perspective.)
I’m betting that more PMOs will organize themselves this way—with project professionals dedicated to business units, strategic objectives, product families, or some other semi-permanent entity…even if they’re doing mostly Waterfall efforts.
I’m already seeing it happen. Successfully.
Picture a company that has no project managers. Instead, they have portfolio managers, most of whom are former project managers at the top of their field. Each portfolio contains a stream of work (projects, programs, ongoing enhancements, eventual retirements) that, over time, supports a capability the business cares about: the payment platform. The customer-service function. The data infrastructure. The regulatory-reporting function.
The projects inside the portfolio have start dates and end dates. The portfolio manager doesn’t.
Let me be clear: dedicating project professionals to a semi-permanent business area isn’t new or revolutionary. It’s a model many companies already use. It’s just that most find it cost-prohibitive. The portfolio manager role is seen as “extra” to the more critical project managers, and many companies can’t afford to lose the flexibility that comes with a core of PMs they can assign or reassign at will.
The difference between now and five years from now is AI support. Depending on how its agentic capabilities evolve, we may have less demand for classical project management functions, skills, and tasks. Or optimistically, we have the same demand, but one project manager could take on six projects where previously they could run two.
In this version of the future, portfolio managers could easily become the core of a PMO’s staff, with far fewer (or zero) classical project managers running stand-alone projects.
Here’s How This Could Play Out…
I want to stress that this is one possible future. It’s plausible because it’s a continuation of what’s already happening. My argument here is that AI may accelerate the shift. And if I’m right, here’s loosely what it might look like:
- AI absorbs most of the coordination work—status reporting, scheduling, dependency tracking, and meeting documentation. PMI’s own research shows 58% of their membership expects AI to have a “major” or “transformative” impact how projects are delivered within five years, and the administrative layer is where that impact lands first. Fewer classical project managers are needed to run the same number of projects.
- The projects that still need close human attention are the biggest ones—strategic initiatives sponsored by the executive team, not functional middle management.
- Expectations for the humans running those projects skyrocket. They’re hired for their judgment, not their organizational skills, and held accountable for outcomes they aren’t responsible for today. The position also becomes riskier, since now, project professionals will be responsible for AI’s output too. If something goes wrong, it’s on the PM, not the AI.
- Empowerment has to rise to match. The savvy organizations will realize you can’t hire a Ferrari and put it on a Go-Cart course. If they still believe they need a human at the helm (and they will), that human has to be someone with superior executive judgment, business acumen, and comfort “managing” human and agentic AI teams.
- Strategic roles work best when they’re long-term. A fresh PM every eighteen months, starting from zero institutional memory, can’t easily deliver quality decision-making. That’s where many companies would start experimenting with turning the top 20% of their Project Managers into Portfolio Managers (or hiring top talent from the outside).
If this happens, it won’t be this clean. Some organizations will stop at #3 and never give their leaders what they need to do the job well. (The more things change, the more things stay the same.) But if this holds true—even a little—then the next natural question is:
Are Project Managers Ready to be Portfolio Managers?
If the role owns a portfolio, makes decisions with P&L impact, negotiates priorities with executives, and protects the business case across the full value cycle, the job description looks a lot more like a director than a project manager. Not everyone in the PM seat today is ready for that.
This is where the PMI business acumen finding from earlier comes back and hits harder. The research isn’t just describing a performance gap in today’s role. It’s describing the exact capability gap that will separate the PMs who step up into the portfolio-level role from the ones who get passed over for someone else—an internal business leader, an external hire, or a fractional executive.
That last option deserves a closer look. Some organizations won’t develop portfolio leaders from within the PM bench—they’ll reach into finance, strategy, or operations and hire someone who already has the P&L literacy. That’s a real possibility, and arguably the more likely path for organizations that need portfolio-level accountability now rather than in three years. The PM profession doesn’t automatically own this future. It has to earn it.
I’m not worried that the PM role goes away. I’m worried that a lot of the people doing the job now won’t have the skills to do the new job well.
That gap raises a build-or-buy question. Some organizations will develop portfolio-level capability internally over a few years. Others—particularly those who need it now—will bring it in from outside, and I expect we’ll see a new flavor of external engagement emerge: not staff augmentation, not a single-project PM contract, but a longer-term embedded role where an outside professional carries the portfolio while the internal bench is built. Closer to a fractional executive model than to “rent us a PM for nine months.”
Final Question: Is This Still Project Management?
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable for the profession. Take a role that owns a portfolio, makes decisions with P&L impact, stays permanent, and carries long-term value accountability, and you’ve moved past project management.
What you have is a portfolio manager, a product owner, a value stream owner, or something we haven’t named yet.
The titles already exist. Some of them live inside the PM profession’s borders and some don’t.
So here’s the honest question. Could this model still be called “project management,” as it is understood today? Is the profession dying, or is it upleveling? I think it’s both.
The old shape is scaling back fast: coordination, status reporting, temporary presence, and a handoff at closeout. That work is increasingly well-supported by AI, with fewer traditional PMs needed to manage the same number of projects.
The new shape is being born. “PMs-turned-Portfolio-Leaders” is one possible future—the idea that PMs become permanent, decision-empowered, accountable for realized value, cross-project in scope.
What keeps the profession alive is whether it recognizes the new shape, names it, develops people into it, and stops insisting that “project manager” means what it used to mean. The business leaders redesigning the work aren’t waiting. The role is already changing. The open question is whether we catch up.
If You Only Do One Thing
Pick one PM on your team and ask what their job will look like in five years. If the answer is “the same as today, with better tools,” that’s information—about them, about your development ladder, about whether your organization is designing for the future or patching the present, and about the gap between what you think the role is and what the market is already turning it into.
If the honest answer is “different enough that I’m not sure it’s still my job,” take that seriously. The role is evolving. Your best PMs have probably already noticed.