50 Essential Thought Leaders in Project Management Globally

Project management is no longer a support function. It is the operating system of modern organisations. When the Project Management Institute forecasts that global demand for project professionals could reach 65 million by 2035, representing a 64 percent increase from today's workforce, that is not a number about certification pipelines or software markets. It is a claim about where value gets created, strategies succeed or fail, and organisations prove capable of change. The world currently has approximately 40 million project management professionals, according to PMI's 2025 research, and the shortfall of nearly 30 million projected by 2035 means that every organisation, in every sector, is going to be navigating a talent and knowledge gap that cannot be filled by credentials alone.

What fills it, in part, is thought leadership. The people on this list are shaping how a global profession thinks about delivery, leadership, AI, sustainability, governance, and the human dimensions of getting difficult things done. They are practitioners, academics, educators, coaches, authors, and community builders who show up regularly with substantive original thinking rather than broadcast content. They post, write, build communities, develop frameworks, and challenge assumptions at a moment when the profession desperately needs all of those things simultaneously.

The most urgent challenges facing project professionals in 2026 are not methodological. Agile and hybrid delivery are mature enough to be defaults rather than innovations. The genuinely hard problems are about cognitive risk, the wrong mental models, unchallenged assumptions, and overconfidence in automated answers that AI makes easier to make at scale. According to PMI's 2025 Pulse of the Profession research, only 23 percent of today's projects are aligned to organisational goals, meaning three in four projects are leaving strategic value on the table. The same research indicates that sustainability-aligned projects are 2.6 times more likely to succeed than those without that alignment, a finding that has significant implications for how project portfolios are designed and governed.

This list brings together 50 voices from across seven disciplinary streams, from six continents, spanning Agile methodology and PMO governance, AI integration and sustainable delivery, career coaching and academic research. The list was deliberately built to move past the most prominent household names in favour of voices the reader may not yet have encountered, particularly those in the 5,000 to 100,000 follower range who are creating original content regularly and doing work that has measurable influence on how people practice the profession.

If your team is already doing the technical work of projects well but the leadership conversations around accountability, communication, and team dynamics are where things break down, Jonno White is a Brisbane-based leadership consultant and keynote speaker who helps organisations have those conversations more effectively. Reach out at jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your next team offsite, workshop, or keynote.

Why Project Management Thought Leadership Matters in 2026

The stakes of ignoring the thought leadership space in project management have never been higher. Seventy-one percent of companies believe their employees need more project management skills, according to Wellingtone's 2024 State of Project Management report, indicating that the knowledge gap is not a niche concern but a mainstream organisational challenge. PMI's 2020 research estimated that organisations lose an average of 11.4 percent of project investment due to poor project performance, a figure that when applied to global project spending represents trillions of dollars annually. And the profession itself is undergoing a fundamental shift: AI in project management is projected to grow from $3 billion to over $7 billion by 2029, and that growth demands a level of critical thinking about what AI can and cannot do in project contexts that most practitioner communities are only beginning to develop.

The people on this list are where that critical thinking lives. Following them does not mean adopting any single methodology or subscribing to any particular view of what the future of the profession looks like. It means staying connected to the best available thinking across a field that is changing faster than most organisations can keep up with. Whether you are a project manager trying to navigate the integration of AI into your workflows, a PMO leader trying to demonstrate strategic value to executives who question your relevance, a sponsor trying to understand why initiatives keep missing their outcomes, or a practitioner building your first team, there is someone on this list whose work is directly relevant to where you are.

If your organisation is grappling with the leadership dimensions of delivery, including the difficult conversations, accountability gaps, and team dynamics that affect project outcomes, Jonno White is a globally delivered keynote speaker and Certified Working Genius Facilitator who works with leadership teams around the world. Bringing Jonno in to facilitate a Working Genius session or leadership workshop is a practical way to address the human foundations of project performance. Contact jonno@consultclarity.org to find out more.

How This List Was Compiled

Every person on this list was selected on three criteria. First, substantive contribution to the field, defined as published work, developed frameworks, delivered keynotes or workshops, or built communities that demonstrably advance how project professionals think and practice. Second, active engagement, meaning original content created and shared regularly in 2025 or 2026, not a historical reputation maintained by occasional reposting. Third, deliberate inclusion of voices the reader may not yet have encountered, with a strong preference for professionals in the 5,000 to 100,000 follower range who are building their platforms through the quality of their thinking rather than the scale of their broadcast.

This list represents voices from across North America, Europe, South America, the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East, and Africa. It deliberately moves past the most prominent household names in project management to surface the people whose work is actively shaping the next chapter of the profession.

Category: Agile and Methodology Pioneers

The foundational methodologies of modern project management were developed by practitioners who challenged the assumption that projects needed to be planned in full before they could begin. This category brings together the people who created, codified, and continue to evolve the Agile approaches that now underpin a significant proportion of all project delivery globally.

1. Jim Highsmith

One of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, Jim Highsmith spent decades working as a practitioner and consultant before helping articulate a set of values that would reshape an entire industry. He is the author of Adaptive Software Development, a foundational Agile text published before the Manifesto existed, and his subsequent book Agile Project Management provided one of the first rigorous frameworks for applying Agile principles at the project leadership level. Highsmith co-founded the Agile Alliance and the Agile Project Leadership Network, two communities that gave early Agile practitioners places to develop their thinking together.

What distinguishes Highsmith from most Agile commentators is his consistent focus on outcomes over process, a position he took before it became fashionable and has maintained through decades of change in the methodology landscape. He continues to write and speak on the evolution of Agile into questions of organisational adaptability, leadership under uncertainty, and the values foundations that he believes most Agile adoptions quietly abandon in favour of process compliance. For practitioners trying to understand why Agile works when it works, his body of work is the essential starting point.

2. Mike Griffiths

Mike Griffiths helped create the Dynamic Systems Development Method in 1994, making him one of the earliest architects of modern Agile methodology. He went on to serve on the board of the Agile Alliance and co-founded the PMI Agile Community of Practice. His most consequential contribution to the mainstream profession came through his central role in PMI's standards work, including co-writing the agile content for the PMBOK Guide 6th Edition, leading development of the Agile Practice Guide, and serving as co-lead for the PMBOK Guide 7th Edition.

Griffiths has helped create the PMI-ACP certification and written the best-selling PMI-ACP Exam Prep book, which has helped thousands of practitioners formalise their Agile credentials. Based in Alberta, Canada, he continues to consult and train with a specialisation in integrating Agile approaches with traditional project management structures, a hybrid position that reflects the reality of how most large organisations actually operate. His website PM Illustrated reflects his conviction that visual communication and clear thinking go together, and he regularly produces accessible content on how Agile principles apply in complex delivery environments.

3. James Shore

James Shore is the co-author, with Shane Warden, of The Art of Agile Development, now in its second edition, which remains one of the most practically rigorous guides to Agile software development available. He co-created the Agile Fluency Model alongside Diana Larsen, a framework that gives teams a way to understand not just whether they are doing Agile but how well they are benefiting from it. Shore received the Agile Alliance's Gordon Pask Award in 2005 for contributions to Agile practice and has been named one of the most influential people in Agile by InfoQ.

Shore's writing consistently distinguishes between teams that have adopted Agile practices and teams that have actually developed Agile fluency, the deeper capability to benefit from the approach. That distinction is practically important: most organisations that have "gone Agile" are operating at the first level of fluency rather than anywhere near the potential the approach offers. His work on test-driven development, continuous deployment, and evolutionary design has made him a key reference point for practitioners who want to move beyond ceremonial Agile toward delivery that genuinely benefits from the method's principles.

4. Anne Gabrillagues

Anne Gabrillagues is a France-based Agile coach and consultant with deep expertise in scaling Agile practices across large organisations. Her work focuses on the organisational dimension of Agile transformation, helping leadership teams and delivery units move from pilot-level Agile adoption to enterprise-wide agility that actually delivers value rather than just following the prescribed ceremonies. She brings a practitioner's scepticism to Agile transformation, consistently questioning whether the frameworks being adopted are serving the teams or whether the teams have become servants of the frameworks.

Her coaching work emphasises continuous improvement and the human dynamics of distributed teams, areas that become critical as Agile moves out of software contexts into broader organisational delivery. She posts original content on LinkedIn that reflects genuine practitioner experience rather than consulting-firm abstractions, making her a valuable voice for practitioners navigating the messy reality of Agile in large, complex organisations. Her perspective is particularly relevant for leaders in Europe who are implementing Agile in contexts shaped by different organisational cultures than the US software companies where most Agile thinking originated.

5. Dave Prior

Dave Prior is an Agile coach at LeadingAgile with 25 years of experience in Agile transformation. He is one of the most relatable and honest voices in the Agile space, known for candid conversations about the human realities of transformation work, including leadership resistance, team burnout, communication failures, and the gap between what Agile transformation promises and what it actually delivers. His podcast work at LeadingAgile has reached thousands of practitioners and produced a body of conversational thought leadership that complements the more formal academic and consulting output in the field.

Prior's value is in his frank, storytelling-driven approach. He does not smooth over the difficulties of Agile adoption or pretend that the methodology solves problems it cannot solve. His content is useful precisely because it acknowledges that most Agile transformations are harder than the frameworks suggest, and that the human dimensions, including leadership psychology, team trust, and communication culture, are where the real work happens. For practitioners who are tired of Agile content that does not acknowledge the difficulty of the real world, Dave Prior is a consistently honest reference point.

6. Mike Cohn

Mike Cohn is one of the foremost authorities on Scrum and user story methodology globally. Through Mountain Goat Software, he has trained thousands of practitioners in Agile and Scrum approaches and produced some of the most widely used educational resources in the field, including his books on user stories, succeeding with Agile, and Scrum estimating and planning. His LinkedIn Learning and in-person training programmes have reached a global audience, and he remains one of the clearest and most trusted voices on how to implement Scrum practically rather than theoretically.

Cohn's contribution to the standardisation of Agile knowledge has been as important as his training work. His frameworks for user story definition and acceptance criteria have shaped how entire generations of practitioners think about requirements and backlog management. As AI tools begin to automate parts of the user story process, his grounded understanding of what user stories are actually for, which is conversation and alignment rather than documentation, provides an essential check on automation that misses the point. His ongoing writing and content make him a reliable guide as the field navigates AI integration.

Category: Strategy, Portfolio and PMO Excellence

Project management is increasingly understood as a strategic capability rather than an operational function. This category brings together eight practitioners who are redefining what it means to align project delivery with organisational strategy, and who are building and running the governance structures that make that alignment possible.

7. Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez is one of the most influential figures in modern project management. A two-time Thinkers50 honouree, PMI Fellow, former global Chairman of the Project Management Institute, and current Vice President of the Association for Project Management, he has spent more than two decades arguing that project management is the primary vehicle through which organisations execute strategy. He coined the concept of the "project economy," and his 2026 book Powered by Projects, published by HBR Press, provides a bold new framework for reinventing how organisations lead change, deliver value, and adapt to continuous transformation.

Nieto-Rodriguez co-authored the widely read Harvard Business Review article "How AI Will Transform Project Management" alongside Ricardo Viana Vargas, a piece that ranked among HBR's most-read articles globally for nine consecutive weeks. His CEO and Founder role at Projects & Co gives him ongoing access to the transformation challenges of major global organisations including Nestle, L'Oreal, Google, and KLM, and his work continues to push the profession toward a more strategic self-understanding. He is based in Belgium and operates globally, making him a genuinely international voice rather than a US-centric one.

8. Jen Skrabak

Jen Skrabak is a PMI Distinguished Contribution Award recipient and the Chair/Lead Author of both the Governance of Portfolios, Programs, and Projects Practice Guide and The Standard for Portfolio Management for PMI. As Chief Strategy Officer at Strategy+PM LLC, she leads a boutique consultancy focused on strategy, portfolio management, and transformation for Fortune 500 organisations including Oracle, UnitedHealth/Optum, Amgen, Teradata, and Elevance, organisations whose portfolio complexity makes her practical experience directly relevant to the largest project challenges in the world.

The LinkedIn community has recognised her as a Top Voice in Portfolio Management, Programme Management, Change Management, and Business Analysis, a cross-disciplinary recognition that reflects the breadth of her contribution. Her frameworks for aligning portfolio management with strategy have been adopted by practitioners in dozens of countries, and her writing for PMI and The Enterprisers Project consistently translates highly technical governance concepts into actionable leadership guidance. Her workshops on strategy execution and portfolio management are described by participants as among the most practically grounded in the field.

9. Peter Taylor

Peter Taylor, author of The Lazy Project Manager and a fixture in the global PMO speaking circuit, brings a distinctive combination of wit and hard-won delivery experience to the question of how organisations should structure and run their project functions. Affiliated with Dayforce, he has delivered more than 450 lectures in over 25 countries and was named PMO Influencer of the Year in 2020. His "productive laziness" philosophy is a serious point about prioritisation, the idea that the best project managers focus ruthlessly on the effort that delivers the most value rather than performing busyness.

Taylor's latest work, including The Invisible Project Manager, addresses the impact of AI on the PM role directly, asking which elements of project management can and should be automated and which require irreducibly human judgement. His perspective as a practitioner who has led large PMOs across manufacturing, pharma, finance, and public sector gives him genuine cross-industry credibility. He is based in the UK and posts regularly to LinkedIn with a voice that is direct, practical, and occasionally irreverent in ways that make complex governance concepts accessible to practitioners who find traditional PM writing impenetrable.

10. Lindsay Scott

Lindsay Scott is the co-founder of House of PMO and PMO Learning, which together represent one of the most substantial ecosystems dedicated to the professional development of PMO practitioners globally. She also organises the annual PMO Conference, the UK's largest conference for PMO professionals, and serves as the project management careers columnist for PMI's Network magazine. She co-edited the Gower Handbook of People in Project Management, one of the most comprehensive references on the human dimensions of project leadership available.

Scott's work matters because PMO professionals have historically been underserved by professional development infrastructure compared to project managers themselves. The frameworks, career pathways, and community she has built through House of PMO and PMO Mob have given a generation of PMO practitioners language and structures to grow into more strategic roles. Her focus is consistently on how PMOs can remain relevant and impactful as organisations change their structures, a question that becomes more urgent as AI changes what project offices can and should do.

11. Bruno Morgante

Bruno Morgante is the Founder and CEO of Mantegora and one of the most internationally active PMO speakers and coaches in the profession. With more than 20 years leading PMOs in large multinational organisations, he has spoken at the Project, Agile and Leadership Conference in Prague in both 2023 and 2024, the Global Project Management Forum in Riyadh in 2024, and multiple PMI events globally. His coaching and mentorship work with PMO leaders and senior project managers is known for its practical depth, translating theory about PMO maturity into actionable change in how project offices actually operate.

Morgante's content consistently addresses the governance and people development questions that determine whether PMOs thrive or become bureaucratic overhead. He writes and speaks with the authority of someone who has built and led complex project portfolios for Fortune 500 companies, not someone who has studied those organisations from the outside. His focus on measurable outcomes for PMO investment, rather than process compliance as an end in itself, reflects the strategic shift that the best PMO leaders are navigating globally.

12. Joe Campa

Joe Campa is a senior PMO and project management leader at Ontario Power Generation who has built and led award-winning PMOs for major Canadian clean energy megaprojects. Named a Top 50 Global Thought Leader on Project Management by Thinkers360 in 2025, he holds PMP, PMI-PBA, PMI-RMP, PMI-CP, and PMO-CP credentials and has contributed to project management publications through the PM World Library. His work on integrated PMO design for large infrastructure and clean energy projects addresses one of the most consequential project management challenges of the current decade.

Campa's writing and speaking focus on the practical realities of PMO operations in capital-intensive, high-stakes environments where project failure has consequences beyond missed deadlines and budget overruns. His framework for aligning PMO operations with strategic business goals draws on real experience navigating the complexity of regulated, safety-critical energy infrastructure. His perspective is particularly valuable for practitioners working in infrastructure, utilities, and government contexts where the conventional digital-first PM discourse does not fully apply.

13. Americo Pinto

Americo Pinto is the Managing Director of the PMO Global Alliance within PMI, the organisation he founded before its integration into the world's largest project management body. As a former MBA professor at top Latin American universities, an award-winning author, and a globally recognised PMO pioneer, he represents the intersection of academic rigour and practical PMO leadership that the profession needs more of. His decades-long work to establish PMOs as strategic value centres rather than administrative overhead has influenced how PMO governance is conceived in organisations across South America, North America, and Europe.

Pinto posts original content on LinkedIn in both English and Portuguese, giving him reach into the Latin American PM community that most globally oriented thought leaders miss. His combination of academic background and hands-on executive experience makes him one of the most credible voices on what PMO maturity actually means in practice, and his global community-building work has given practitioners in developing regions access to international standards and professional development that would otherwise be difficult to reach.

14. Saby Waraich

Saby Waraich is a CIO and CISO turned strategic advisor who brings 25 years of technology leadership and digital transformation experience across private and public sectors to the project management community. Named a Top 10 Global Thought Leader on Project Management and Business Strategy by Thinkers360 in 2025 and recognised by Forbes Technology Council, he combines real-world leadership credentials with a motivational speaking style that translates complex transformation challenges into human-centred practical guidance.

His keynote speaking and coaching work draws explicitly on the personal and cultural dimensions of leading transformation, including how leaders build resilient teams, navigate ambiguity, and make the mental shifts required to deliver genuine change rather than the appearance of it. Waraich's experience as a CIO and CISO means he understands the intersection of project delivery and technology risk from an executive perspective, a vantage point that is increasingly important as AI and cybersecurity considerations become central to project governance in most large organisations.

Category: AI, Digital and Technology-Driven Project Management

Artificial intelligence is not a future consideration for project managers. It is a current reality that is reshaping risk assessment, scheduling, communications, and the fundamental definition of what a project manager's value-add actually is. This category brings together seven practitioners who are leading the thinking on how AI and digital transformation intersect with project delivery.

15. Kathleen Walch

Kathleen Walch was ranked number one on Thinkers360's Global Thought Leader and Influencer on Project Management list for 2025, a recognition that reflects both the volume and quality of her contribution to the field's most pressing current challenge. As Director of AI Engagement at the Project Management Institute, she guides the global PM community on integrating AI into real-world project delivery. She is co-founder of Cognilytica, an AI research and advisory firm, and co-creator of the CPMAI methodology, the most widely adopted framework for managing AI and machine learning initiatives.

Walch's value to the PM community is practical specificity. Where much AI discourse in project management is generic, her content draws on the CPMAI methodology to show practitioners what AI governance, data maturity, and adoption best practices actually look like in project contexts. Her AI Today Podcast has built a significant audience of practitioners trying to navigate AI integration without either dismissing the technology or overclaiming what it can deliver. Her combination of PMI seniority and independent research credibility through Cognilytica makes her one of the most authoritative voices in the space.

16. Ricardo Viana Vargas

Ricardo Viana Vargas is the CEO of Macrosolutions and the most widely followed project management thought leader in Latin America, ranked number one in project management globally by Favikon, with organic LinkedIn growth from 84,000 to over 101,000 followers in 18 months. He co-authored the Harvard Business Review article "How AI Will Transform Project Management" with Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, which ranked among HBR's most-read articles globally for nine consecutive weeks, and his LinkedIn Learning course "Leveraging Generative AI for Project Management" has been taken by more than 150,000 professionals.

Vargas's contribution to the AI and project management conversation is grounded in decades of practical experience in capital projects, global initiatives, and crisis management across more than 55 countries. His 2026 writing and speaking have focused on what he describes as the year of repositioning, the idea that project professionals need to fundamentally rethink their role as AI takes over operational and analytical tasks that used to define the job. His newsletter, podcast, and regular LinkedIn content make him one of the most prolific and substantive voices on the future of the profession.

17. Declan Foster

Declan Foster is the Founder and CEO of Project Pal AI and the head of the AI Innovation Hub at the Ireland Chapter of PMI. He is the co-author, with Joanne Griffin, of Humology: How to Put Humans Back at the Heart of Technology, and brings over 20 years of consulting, ERP/HRIS delivery, change management, and global project execution across multiple continents to the AI integration conversation. Ranked among top global thought leaders in project and change management by Thinkers360, he is one of the most practically grounded voices on how AI can be deployed in project contexts without losing the human judgement that distinguishes good project leadership from automated task management.

Foster's work through Project Pal AI and his thought leadership writing consistently asks the ethical and practical questions that AI enthusiasts sometimes skip: What happens when AI-generated project plans are wrong? Who is accountable when algorithm-driven risk assessments miss the point? How do project managers develop and maintain judgement if the judgement calls are increasingly made for them? His background in both technology delivery and change management gives him an unusually well-rounded perspective on these questions that is genuinely distinctive in the AI-in-PM space.

18. Mashhood Ahmed

Mashhood Ahmed is a project manager and researcher who began investigating AI and project management in 2017, well before the current wave of AI discourse in the profession. Since 2023, he has spoken at more than 40 events and shared his research with over 40,000 project managers globally, and in 2024 he was named to PMI's official list of Influencers for Artificial Intelligence. Based in the UAE and operating globally, he represents the kind of practitioner-researcher hybrid that the profession needs more of, someone who understands both the technical realities of AI systems and the practical realities of project delivery.

Ahmed's value is in his combination of early research and practitioner credibility. He is not approaching AI as a technology question but as a project management question, asking what AI means for how projects are planned, executed, monitored, and closed. His contributions to The Digital Project Manager community and his global speaking circuit have given him a cross-geographical perspective on AI adoption that is more nuanced than the view that dominates most AI discourse in the profession.

19. Galen Low

Galen Low is the co-founder of The Digital Project Manager, the most widely read independent platform for digital project management education and community. As the host of The DPM Podcast and lead instructor at The DPM School, he has spent more than 13 years in client services and digital transformation advisory roles in government, healthcare, transit, and retail. His content focuses on the human and organisational dimensions of digital transformation, including what it takes to help teams and leaders adapt to new ways of working rather than simply deploy new tools.

Low's value to the PM community is his consistent focus on the practitioner rather than the theorist. The Digital Project Manager was built by and for people who manage real digital projects with real clients, and his content reflects the complexity and occasional messiness of that work in ways that more polished consulting-firm output rarely does. His 2026 work on AI adoption in digital delivery has been particularly useful for practitioners trying to understand what AI actually changes about their day-to-day work versus what it simply automates.

20. Ben Aston

Ben Aston founded The Digital Project Manager in 2011, building it into one of the largest independent platforms for project delivery education globally. A certified Scrum Master and PRINCE2 Practitioner, he has more than 15 years of experience in digital project delivery across transit, utilities, consumer electronics, automotive, and financial services at agencies including Dare, Wunderman, DLKW Lowe, and DDB. Through The Digital Project Manager and his media company Black and White Zebra, he has given digital project managers a credible professional community and educational infrastructure.

Aston's particular contribution is in democratising access to project management thinking. The Digital Project Manager's combination of free content, tools comparisons, training programmes, and community membership has made high-quality PM education accessible to practitioners who do not have access to expensive corporate training programmes. His own writing bridges the gap between digital leadership strategy and the tactical realities of managing client relationships, scope, and team dynamics in agency and technology contexts.

21. Menaka Gopinath

Menaka Gopinath is the Chief Marketing Officer of the Project Management Institute, bringing decades of brand, marketing, and growth strategy experience from Apple, Nike, Uber, P&G, and Meta to the task of positioning the PM profession globally. Her role at PMI gives her a unique vantage point on how the profession is understood, or misunderstood, by the business leaders and organisations it serves, and her content consistently addresses the gap between the project management community's self-understanding and how C-suite executives actually perceive project delivery as a strategic capability.

Her work at PMI driving global brand, communications, and marketing outreach makes her simultaneously one of the highest-profile advocates for the profession and one of its most sceptical questioners of its own assumptions. Her LinkedIn content draws on her experience at the world's most successful consumer brands to ask what project management could learn about how it positions, communicates, and demonstrates value. For PMO leaders and project managers trying to earn credibility with executive sponsors, her perspective on the marketing of project capability is practically useful.

Category: Digital Agency and Creative Project Management

The digital and creative agency world has produced some of the most sophisticated practitioners in the profession, because it places project managers in environments of high complexity, compressed timelines, demanding clients, and frequent ambiguity. This category brings together five voices who have built their thought leadership through that particular crucible.

22. Elizabeth Harrin

Elizabeth Harrin is a Fellow of the Association for Project Management, founder of the Rebel's Guide to Project Management community and the Project Management Rebels mentoring group, and one of the most prolific and practically grounded project management writers active today. With more than 20 years of experience managing large IT and business change projects in financial services and healthcare, she is an author, trainer, mentor, and educator whose work focuses consistently on the people side of delivery rather than the methodological. Her book Managing Multiple Projects, published by Kogan Page, provides one of the most comprehensive frameworks available for the multi-project reality that most practitioners actually face.

Harrin started writing about project management in 2006, the year she published her first book, and her community of 16,000 project professionals and her long-running blog represent a sustained commitment to making the difficult parts of the job more navigable for practitioners at every level. Her content is particularly valuable for the large majority of project managers who manage multiple simultaneous projects rather than single large ones, a reality that most PM frameworks, built around single-project models, do not adequately address. She is based in Sussex, UK and maintains active engagement with her community through regular content and live events.

23. Moira Alexander

Moira Alexander is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of PMWorld 360 Magazine, a digital project management and leadership publication, and the founder of Lead-Her-Ship Group. The author of LEAD or LAG: Linking Strategic Project Management and Thought Leadership, she has more than 25 years of experience in project management and is a regular columnist for CIO and TechRepublic. Her work consistently sits at the intersection of leadership strategy, project governance, and the practical realities of managing distributed and remote teams.

Alexander's most distinctive contribution is in her cross-disciplinary perspective, the ability to bring strategic leadership thinking into project management contexts and project management rigour into strategic leadership conversations. Her columns for CIO and TechRepublic reach audiences beyond the PM community, helping to translate what good project management actually looks like to the technology executives and business leaders who commission and sponsor projects. Her content on digital transformation and leadership accountability is directly relevant to the PMO leaders trying to make the case for project governance investment.

24. Christina Sookram

Christina Sookram is the founder of CNS Project Consulting Inc. and an instructor at Wilfrid Laurier University and OCAD University, with more than 15 years of corporate experience as a project manager at some of Canada's largest technology companies. A subject matter expert in both waterfall and Agile delivery, she has deep practical experience with Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe methodologies and brings those experiences into her coaching, training, and community work. Her focus on authentic leadership, emotional intelligence, and communication skills in project contexts gives her content a human-centred quality that distinguishes it from purely process-focused PM writing.

Sookram's contribution to the PM community includes her active mentorship of professionals navigating their way into and through the field, her community building work through The Digital Project Manager, and her academic role bringing rigorous PM education to university students entering the profession without the benefit of peer community or applied practice. Her perspective as a Canadian practitioner working across waterfall and Agile environments gives her content broad practical applicability across industries and project types.

25. Daniel Hemhauser

Daniel Hemhauser is the Founder and CEO of The PM Playbook, a platform dedicated to human-centred project leadership, career development, and emotionally intelligent project delivery. With more than two decades of global IT and project management experience, PMP and PMI-ACP certified, and recognised by Thinkers360 as a top global thought leader in project management, he has built a community of practitioners looking to grow beyond task-driven execution into strategic, emotionally intelligent leadership. His coaching, content, and community work addresses the professional development questions that formal PM education often neglects.

Hemhauser's writing consistently challenges the assumption that project management is primarily a technical or methodological discipline. The most valuable skills for a project manager, he argues, are human, the ability to build trust, manage stakeholder expectations, navigate organisational politics, and lead teams through uncertainty. His podcast and newsletter work complement his coaching services and make substantive leadership thinking accessible to practitioners at mid-career stages who are ready to develop beyond the fundamentals.

26. Henny Portman

Henny Portman is an independent PM consultant and educator based in the Netherlands with deep expertise in PRINCE2, Agile, and the frameworks that bridge them. He is one of Europe's most prolific project management bloggers, maintaining a long-running blog that reviews PM books, frameworks, and tools with a critical rigour that is rare in a field dominated by promotional content. His work consistently evaluates methodologies on their merits rather than their market positioning, making him a trusted reference for practitioners trying to navigate the crowded landscape of PM frameworks.

Portman's value is his intellectual independence and his European perspective on a field whose thought leadership is heavily weighted toward US and UK voices. His detailed reviews and analyses of PRINCE2, PMI, Agile, IPMA, and hybrid frameworks give practitioners a comparative view that is genuinely educational rather than promotional. For organisations and practitioners who need to make informed decisions about which frameworks to adopt in which contexts, his body of work is one of the most useful reference points available in the English-language PM community.

27. Suzanna Haworth

Suzanna Haworth is a digital project director with more than 14 years of agency experience, having managed projects for BBC, WaterAid, Channel 4, Esso, Lipton Tea, SEAT, and Mozilla. A certified Scrum Master and frequent conference speaker, she contributes thought leadership to The Digital Project Manager on Agile and waterfall workflows, scope management, team collaboration, and stakeholder management, areas where her specific client-service experience gives her writing practical credibility that is hard to replicate from a purely consultancy perspective.

Haworth's content is particularly useful for digital project managers working in agency contexts where client relationships, scope creep, and delivery under pressure are constant realities. Her frank discussion of the tensions between Agile and waterfall in client-facing digital environments reflects real-world complexity that much PM discourse resolves too neatly. She is based in the UK and her European, client-service-centric perspective on digital delivery addresses a significant portion of the global PM workforce that is underrepresented in most PM thought leadership content.

28. Laurel Sim

Laurel Sim is the Vice President of Portfolio Management at Taleo Project Services, bringing more than 20 years of experience in the field including senior roles at KPMG and Fujitsu. She was named Project Leader of the Year by the Project Management Institute, a recognition that reflects both the quality of her delivery outcomes and her broader contribution to the profession. Her track record with Fortune 500 clients and her ability to secure and maintain senior strategic relationships across industry sectors give her practical credibility that spans public and private sector project environments.

Sim's value to the PM community is in her combination of executive-level portfolio leadership and consistent accessibility as a speaker and mentor. Her logical, outcome-focused approach to project management, combined with her experience across multiple industries and geographies, makes her a useful reference point for practitioners trying to understand what senior project leadership looks like in practice rather than in theory. She posts regularly on LinkedIn with content grounded in real delivery experience, which is comparatively rare among practitioners at her level of seniority.

Category: People, Leadership and Coaching in Project Management

The most important predictor of project success is not the methodology chosen or the tools deployed. It is the quality of the leadership involved. This category brings together eight practitioners who are advancing the human, coaching, and leadership dimensions of the profession.

29. Margaret Meloni

Margaret Meloni is a project management educator, author, and speaker who brings emotional intelligence and mindfulness into the delivery space at a depth that few practitioners in the field match. Her work on compassionate leadership, mental health in project environments, and the emotional resilience required of project managers addresses dimensions of the work that conventional PM education systematically ignores. She maintains a long-running website, regular video content, and speaking engagement schedule that makes her one of the most accessible sources of human-centred PM thinking available.

Meloni's contribution is in naming and legitimising the emotional and psychological dimensions of project work. Project managers experience high levels of occupational stress, accountability without authority, and the burden of mediating between executives' expectations and teams' realities. Her work gives practitioners frameworks for managing their own wellbeing, leading with empathy, and creating team environments where people can do their best work. As AI takes over more of the technical and analytical work of project management, the human and relational dimensions she emphasises will become more rather than less important.

30. Benjamin Chan

Benjamin Chan is a Project Leadership Success Coach and one of the most recognised PM content creators in the field, named among the top three global PM Creators on LinkedIn. Holding PMP, P.Eng, CMC, and ASM credentials, he has built a global coaching and speaking practice through his Organized Chaos Cafe platform and PM-Mastery workshops, helping project managers develop from overwhelmed task-trackers into confident, strategic leaders. His content is distinctive for its combination of professional credibility, practical specificity, and motivational energy.

Chan's coaching work addresses the confidence and career development gaps that many qualified PM practitioners struggle with, the gap between having the technical knowledge and being able to exercise genuine leadership in complex organisational environments. His content on stakeholder management, executive communication, and the mindset shifts required to move from execution to strategy is consistently among the most practically useful in the LinkedIn PM community. His global speaking engagements have taken him to audiences across North America, Asia, and Europe, giving him a cross-geographical perspective on the shared human challenges of project leadership.

31. Sonaya Williams

Sonaya Williams is the founder of The CEO Partner, a boutique agency focused on helping business owners and entrepreneurs build growth and revenue through better operational systems, including project management as a strategic discipline rather than an administrative one. With more than a decade of experience leading digital organisations and a background in financial systems analysis, she brings an entrepreneur's perspective to project management that is underrepresented in a community dominated by corporate and enterprise voices.

Williams's content is particularly valuable for practitioners working with small businesses and growing companies where formal PM infrastructure does not exist and the project manager must build systems and culture simultaneously. Her advocacy for process automation, digital tools, and operational frameworks designed for smaller organisations fills a genuine gap in PM thought leadership. She is a DPM Expert and her participation in the Digital Project Manager community has extended the reach of her thinking to a broad audience of practitioners.

32. Sarah M. Hoban

Sarah Hoban is the Senior Director in the PMO at Aura, a digital security company, with 15 years of experience in project and programme management across high-risk, high-budget initiatives. She is a former strategy consultant who brings a combined strategic and operational perspective to PM leadership that is practically rare, most practitioners come from one direction or the other. Her writing for The Digital Project Manager and her website address the real complexity of senior-level delivery, including product operations, operations management, and the strategic planning dimensions of PMO leadership.

Hoban's commitment to promoting women in technology and project management leadership gives her content a dimension that extends beyond delivery technique to professional development and equity. Her perspectives on stakeholder engagement, leadership under pressure, and navigating complex organisational dynamics are grounded in real experience with the kinds of initiatives where things genuinely go wrong if the leadership is not right. She is an active community contributor and mentor for practitioners navigating the path to senior PM leadership.

33. Dr. Tony Prensa

Dr. Tony Prensa has spent more than 35 years as a professor, consultant, and international speaker at the intersection of project management, business psychology, and cross-cultural leadership. He is a sought-after speaker for IEOM Society International events and has published more than 30 articles on LinkedIn addressing the psychological and motivational dimensions of project leadership. His work integrates emotional awareness, cultural agility, and growth mindset into the project management conversation in ways that are practically relevant to the increasingly global and diverse teams that project managers lead.

Prensa's value is in his bridge between psychology and practice. The emotional and cultural dimensions of project leadership are well-documented as critical success factors, and yet most PM education treats them as soft add-ons to the hard methodology. His academic background combined with his consulting and speaking experience gives him the credibility to argue, with evidence, that these so-called soft skills are actually the hard ones, the ones that predict delivery outcomes more reliably than any methodology, a position that PMI's own Pulse research increasingly supports.

34. Barbara Kephart

Barbara Kephart is the Founder and Chief Project Officer at Projects Pivot and has taught project management at Conestoga College, California State University, and the University of Guelph. With more than 20 years of PMBOK-based project management experience across medical software, clinical trials, and cybersecurity, and faculty-level experience teaching technical project management and stakeholder engagement, she occupies a useful position between the academic and practitioner worlds. Her focus is on helping organisations pivot, prioritise, and complete projects with the strategic clarity that differentiates good project governance from bureaucratic compliance.

Kephart's particular expertise in translating technical project execution into business value is practically important for project managers who work in highly regulated environments, specifically those in healthcare, cybersecurity, and clinical research, where the project manager must navigate complex compliance requirements while maintaining stakeholder confidence and delivery momentum. Her mentoring work with teams and executive leaders addresses the real capability gaps that formal PM training often leaves unaddressed.

35. Jean Kang

Jean Kang is a programme manager at Figma who has navigated seven career pivots through companies including Meta, Pinterest, Intuit, LinkedIn, and now Figma, making her one of the most practically experienced voices on career navigation and skill transferability in the PM space. She is the founder of Path to PM, a coaching service helping career changers and aspiring project and programme managers land roles without necessarily holding PMP certifications, addressing real accessibility barriers in the profession. Her daily LinkedIn content on programme management and career development has built a significant following among practitioners early in their careers.

Kang's content is especially valuable for the large and growing segment of the PM workforce entering the profession from non-traditional backgrounds. Her experience at some of the most demanding product and technology organisations in the world gives her practical credibility, while her coaching work gives her a human understanding of what barriers aspiring PMs face. Her focus on building programme management skills through demonstrated capability rather than formal credentials reflects a genuine evolution in how the profession recognises talent.

36. Annie MacLeod

Annie MacLeod brings more than 30 years of project management experience to her work as a coach, mentor, and community builder. She co-founded the Project Management GameBoard, a tool designed to improve project performance and PM confidence through experiential learning, and is a self-described Miro expert and evangelist for the power of visual collaboration in project teams. Based in the UK, she began her career in the tech sector in the 1980s and founded her own consulting firm almost 25 years ago, giving her a practitioner perspective that spans multiple technological and methodological eras.

MacLeod's contribution is in her recognition that project management confidence and performance are built through practice and community rather than certification and theory alone. The Project Management GameBoard reflects her commitment to experiential learning, and her ongoing coaching and mentorship work supports project managers who want to move from technically competent to genuinely influential. Her Miro expertise reflects a practical understanding of how distributed teams need visual and collaborative infrastructure to maintain the kind of alignment that in-person project teams take for granted.

Category: Sustainable, Research and Global Project Management

The idea that projects have social and environmental consequences beyond their delivery objectives is no longer a niche sustainability concern. It is a mainstream governance question for every organisation that commissions significant projects. This category brings together nine voices at the intersection of research, sustainability, and global delivery.

37. Joel Carboni

Joel Carboni is the leading global authority on sustainable project management. As the Founder and President of GPM Global, he created the PRiSM project delivery methodology and the P5 Standard for Sustainability in Project Management, both of which have been adopted by corporations, governments, and project management bodies globally as the benchmark frameworks for integrating sustainability into project delivery. He holds a PhD in Sustainable Development and Environment from Ball State University, has worked in more than 55 countries, and served as President Emeritus of the International Project Management Association in the US.

Since 2022, PMI has offered GPM's Sustainable Project Management certification to its global community, and GPM content has been integrated into PMI's AI-powered knowledge platform, recognitions of the extent to which Carboni's work has moved from the periphery to the mainstream of the profession. His Thinkers360 recognition and LinkedIn content regularly argue that sustainability in project management is not a niche but a knowledge area as fundamental as risk or stakeholder management, a position that the accelerating climate and ESG governance context is increasingly validating.

38. Lavagnon Ika

Lavagnon Ika is a Full Professor of Project Management and the Founding Director of the Major Projects Observatory at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa. A World Bank Fellow, he has twice received the Global Research Award from the International Project Management Association and provided guidance for both the World Bank and PMI on their most significant recent research programmes. His academic work focuses on project success, major infrastructure delivery, international development projects, and project management theory in the Global South, areas where the gap between academic knowledge and practitioner reality is both large and consequential.

Ika's contribution to the profession is in bringing academic rigour to questions that practitioners care deeply about. His research on why major projects so consistently experience cost overruns and benefit shortfalls, and what project governance structures actually improve outcomes rather than just compliance, addresses some of the most persistent and expensive problems in the profession. His extraordinary professorship at the University of Pretoria and his work on project management in African contexts make him one of the most globally inclusive academic voices in the field.

39. Yasmina Khelifi

Yasmina Khelifi is a multilingual global project manager who writes and speaks in English, French, and German, giving her unusual reach across European PM communities that are otherwise linguistically siloed. A regular contributor to PMI's Voices of Project Management blog and active DPM community member, she brings an international practitioner's perspective to project management that reflects the realities of cross-cultural, cross-border delivery rather than the US-centric view that dominates most PM content. Her writing addresses the practical challenges of managing projects across linguistic, cultural, and organisational boundaries.

Khelifi's value is in her explicit focus on the international and cross-cultural dimensions of project work that most PM frameworks address poorly or not at all. As project delivery becomes increasingly global and distributed, the skills she writes about, cross-cultural communication, multilingual stakeholder engagement, international team dynamics, are moving from nice-to-have to essential. Her practitioner voice, grounded in real delivery experience across European contexts, gives her content practical credibility that is rare in the cross-cultural PM space.

40. Lynda Bourne

Lynda Bourne is one of Australia's most respected project management practitioners and a globally recognised authority on stakeholder engagement. The founder of MOSAICPM and a regular contributor to PMI's projectmanagement.com platform, she has developed practical frameworks for stakeholder analysis and engagement that have been adopted by practitioners and organisations across Australia, Asia-Pacific, and internationally. Her work consistently argues that stakeholder engagement is not a soft skill bolted onto project management but a core technical discipline with its own frameworks, methods, and professional standards.

Bourne's contribution to the Australian and international PM community includes her long-standing roles at the APM, PMI, and IPMA levels, giving her cross-body credibility that is unusual among thought leaders typically affiliated with a single professional organisation. Her practical writing on stakeholder relationship management draws on decades of real project delivery experience in complex organisational environments, making her one of the most authoritative voices on one of the most consistently underperforming dimensions of project practice globally.

41. Elise Stevens

Elise Stevens is the founder of The Project Motivator and one of Australia's most active project management speakers and coaches. A member of the Australian Institute of Project Management and a regular contributor to the national PM conversation, she brings a practitioner-motivator perspective to the profession that is specifically designed to help project managers reconnect with why they do the work and how to sustain performance under the pressures the role routinely generates. Her coaching, speaking, and podcast work addresses the resilience, wellbeing, and professional development dimensions of a role that routinely exceeds its practitioners.

Stevens's value is in her explicit focus on the human experience of being a project manager, something the profession's substantial body of technical literature rarely addresses. Project management has high burnout rates, complex accountability structures, and significant emotional demands that sit alongside the methodological complexity. Her work gives practitioners tools and frameworks for managing their own performance and wellbeing rather than just their projects, a dimension of professional development that organisations and practitioners consistently neglect.

42. Donna McGeorge

Donna McGeorge is an Australian PM author and productivity expert whose book The 1 Day Refund challenges the assumption that more work and more meetings always deliver better outcomes. She is a regular contributor to PM Today and a sought-after speaker on productivity, time management, and intelligent work design in project environments. Her approach to project productivity draws on behavioural science and practical organisational psychology to identify the specific working patterns that waste project teams' most valuable resource, their collective attention and energy.

McGeorge's work is practically relevant to every project manager who has watched a well-structured project grind to a halt because of meeting overload, unclear priorities, and the habitual behaviours that organisations mistake for productivity. Her Australian base and international speaking profile give her content reach beyond the Asia-Pacific region, and her focus on the behavioural and organisational dimensions of project performance addresses a gap that purely methodological PM content cannot fill.

43. Mahesh EV

Mahesh EV is a Senior Project Manager at AMPIN Energy Transition with more than 12 years of experience managing thermal power and renewable energy projects across the full project lifecycle from initiation through construction to plant handover. He holds PMP, PRINCE2 Practitioner, ASM, CSPM, CSAPM, and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt credentials and was ranked among the top global thought leaders on project management by Thinkers360 in 2025. His work represents the application of rigorous project management methodology in one of the most consequential project contexts of the current decade, the energy transition.

EV's content draws on his direct experience managing large-scale infrastructure projects in India's rapidly growing renewable energy sector, giving it a specificity and relevance to the Global South delivery context that most PM thought leadership, overwhelmingly focused on digital and corporate environments in developed economies, does not offer. His combination of traditional and Agile methodologies reflects the hybrid reality of large infrastructure delivery, and his active LinkedIn presence makes his practical insights accessible to an international audience.

44. Vanina Mangano

Vanina Mangano is a PMI Argentina board member and one of the most active voices for the Latin American project management community on international platforms. Her work in building the PMI Argentina chapter and extending its connections to global PM bodies has given the region's practitioner community stronger access to international standards, professional development, and recognition. She posts consistently in both Spanish and English, giving her content reach across a community that is large, growing, and underrepresented in the global PM thought leadership conversation.

Mangano's contribution is in representing a significant and rapidly developing PM community to the broader global profession. Latin America's project management growth, driven by infrastructure development, digital transformation, and increasing integration with global supply chains, means that the voices shaping how the profession develops there will have an increasingly significant impact on the field globally. Her board-level engagement with PMI and her community building work make her one of the most important connectors between the Latin American PM community and the international profession.

45. Gino Terentim

Gino Terentim is a Brazilian change management and project management leader with a significant following in the Latin American PM community and growing international recognition. He appeared as a co-facilitator alongside Ricardo Viana Vargas at the CBGPL 2026 conference, one of Brazil's largest project management leadership gatherings, delivering a workshop on change management frameworks for project teams. His work consistently addresses the intersection of change management and project delivery, an intersection that is practically critical but methodologically undersupported in most PM frameworks.

Terentim's value is in his focus on the human and organisational change dimensions of project delivery, the recognition that most significant projects fail not because of poor planning or insufficient resources but because of insufficient attention to how organisations and individuals change during delivery. His combination of academic grounding in change management methodology and practical experience in Brazilian project contexts gives him a perspective that is genuinely distinctive from both the Anglo-American PM mainstream and the purely academic change management literature.

Category: PMO, Programme and Practitioner Excellence

This final category brings together six practitioners who represent the coalface of the profession, the people building and running PMOs, managing complex programmes, developing practitioners, and delivering the day-to-day project work that translates strategy into outcomes.

46. Capucine Chatman-Williams

Capucine Chatman-Williams is the President and CEO of the PMI Sacramento Valley Chapter and brings 15 years of experience in healthcare and technology projects and operations. She has led cross-functional initiatives including a $100M-plus digital technology roadmap and the expansion of a Medi-Cal programme to 10,000 new rural members, delivering at a scale and complexity that gives her practical credibility with practitioners working on large-scale, mission-critical delivery. Her focus on mentorship, professional development, and strategic partnerships through the PMI-SVC chapter reflects a genuine commitment to building the next generation of PM leaders.

Chatman-Williams's combination of operational delivery credentials, chapter leadership, and community-building work makes her one of the most well-rounded PMO and programme leadership voices in the North American PM community. Her healthcare and technology delivery background is particularly relevant as those two sectors become increasingly intertwined and as the complexity of health technology implementation escalates in most developed economies.

47. Pam Butkowski

Pam Butkowski is the Vice President of Delivery Management at Hero Digital and a serial PMO builder who has constructed and led delivery teams at Wunderman Thompson, Nerdery, and AIM Consulting. A DPM Expert and self-described process specialist, she specialises in team leadership, Agile methods, and process improvement in agency and consulting contexts where the tension between creative flexibility and delivery rigour is a constant operational challenge. Her content focuses on the practical architecture of delivery management systems that work rather than the theoretical models that do not survive contact with a real client relationship.

Butkowski's experience across multiple agencies and consulting organisations gives her a comparative perspective on what PMO and delivery management infrastructure actually looks like when it is working versus when it is becoming bureaucratic overhead. Her community presence within The Digital Project Manager and her speaking work on PMO development in agency contexts addresses a practitioner audience that is large, practically oriented, and often underserved by PM literature focused on enterprise or corporate environments.

48. Marcus Glowasz

Marcus Glowasz is the founder of Marcus Glowasz Ltd and a specialist in data literacy and data-driven project management, with 30 years of international experience in technology and data-driven projects. Ranked among the top global thought leaders in project management by Thinkers360 in 2025, he has developed a distinctive focus on helping project leaders and teams improve their data literacy, the ability to read, analyse, and communicate with data in ways that improve project decision-making rather than simply adding reporting overhead.

Glowasz's emphasis on data literacy in project contexts reflects an important gap in the profession's current skill development. As AI and data-driven tools become standard in project management platforms, the critical skill is not using the tools but interpreting their outputs, questioning their assumptions, and making better decisions because of them rather than despite them. His content gives practitioners and PMO leaders a framework for developing that capability, and his European base and international delivery experience give him a perspective that extends beyond the software and technology contexts where most PM data literacy discourse originates.

49. Kelly Ostrowercha

Kelly Ostrowercha is a freelance project management leader with more than 15 years of experience developing people, teams, and processes across digital agencies, startups, and larger corporations. A regular contributor to The Digital Project Manager and an active community presence, she specialises in developing and implementing process efficiencies and automation, strategic action plans, and mentoring practitioners and teams through the practical challenges of delivery in fast-changing environments. Her work bridges the gap between high-level process design and the granular day-to-day operational realities of actually making that process work.

Ostrowercha's content is valued for its operational specificity. Where much PM thought leadership operates at the level of principles and frameworks, her writing gets into the practical details of workflow design, tool configuration, and team communication protocols that determine whether a delivery system functions or breaks under pressure. For practitioners who are building or refining their delivery operations in digital, agency, or startup contexts, her combination of strategic thinking and operational experience is practically useful in ways that more theoretical content is not.

50. Brad Egeland

Brad Egeland has published more than 6,000 articles on project management and IT consulting over 25 years, making him one of the most prolific writers in the profession. His accessible, consistent writing on PM best practices, leadership, and technology trends has built a substantial following among practitioners who appreciate content that is clear, actionable, and grounded in real delivery experience. His deep technical understanding of IT delivery combined with practical management wisdom gives his work cross-disciplinary applicability across both technology and non-technology project contexts.

Egeland's value is in his consistency and accessibility. The PM community needs practitioners who can communicate complex ideas clearly to a broad audience of practitioners at different career stages, and his 25-year commitment to that work has produced a body of content that serves as a practical reference library for the field. His active LinkedIn presence and regular writing keep him connected to current practitioner concerns in ways that ensure his output remains relevant rather than theoretical.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several thought leaders were seriously considered for this list but were not included in the final 50. Brene Brown, Adam Grant, and Simon Sinek would appear on most lists that address any human dimension of leadership, and their work has influenced how organisations think about vulnerability, motivation, and purpose in ways that overlap with project leadership. This list deliberately moved past these household names to surface voices the reader may not yet have encountered, particularly those doing specific, rigorous work on the methodological and professional challenges of project management rather than general leadership.

Among current practitioners considered but ultimately not selected, a number of strong digital agency voices were set aside in favour of practitioners with broader geographic and disciplinary reach. Several excellent Thinkers360-listed practitioners based in the Middle East and South Asia were considered but could not be fully corroborated through two independent sources before this list was finalised, which is a limitation of any point-in-time curation. This list will be updated as the profession evolves and as additional voices develop the track record to warrant inclusion.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Following Thought Leaders in Project Management

The most common mistake practitioners make when engaging with PM thought leadership is confusing content volume with insight quality. Someone who posts daily on LinkedIn and accumulates a large following is not necessarily a more reliable guide to project management than someone who publishes quarterly with precision and evidence. The most valuable thought leaders in this list are distinguished by the specificity and intellectual honesty of their thinking, not by how often they post or how many followers they have accumulated.

A second common mistake is seeking thought leaders who confirm existing assumptions rather than those who challenge them. The most useful intellectual influence tends to come from voices that identify what you are missing rather than validating what you already believe. Following only PMO-focused voices if you are a PMO leader, or only Agile voices if you are an Agile practitioner, creates an echo chamber that makes it harder to see the limitations of your current approach. The most valuable reading diet for any project professional includes voices from adjacent disciplines and different methodological traditions.

A third mistake is treating thought leadership content as a substitute for deliberate practice. Reading Elizabeth Harrin on managing multiple projects does not substitute for the difficult work of actually managing multiple projects differently. Following Marcus Glowasz on data literacy does not substitute for the slower work of developing genuine data fluency. Thought leadership at its best provides frameworks and language for making sense of experience, not experience itself. The practitioners who get the most value from the voices on this list treat their content as input to practice rather than a replacement for it.

A fourth mistake, particularly common in organisations with formal PM learning programmes, is treating thought leadership as separate from professional development infrastructure rather than as a complement to it. The voices on this list are most valuable when organisations create conditions for practitioners to engage with the ideas, discuss them with peers, and experiment with applying them in real delivery contexts. Passive consumption of thought leadership content, without the community or reflective practice that turns ideas into capability, produces awareness without change.

A fifth mistake is overlooking regional and linguistic diversity. Most English-language PM thought leadership originates from the US and UK. The voices on this list from Brazil, France, the Netherlands, Canada, India, Argentina, Australia, and Ireland reflect a global profession that is developing its thinking in many contexts simultaneously. Following Vanina Mangano, Ricardo Viana Vargas, or Yasmina Khelifi gives access to practitioner communities and delivery contexts that US-centric content rarely addresses, and the problems they are solving are often more relevant to the majority of the world's project managers than the corporate enterprise contexts that dominate the Anglophone conversation.

Implementation Guide: Building Your Project Management Reading and Following List

The most effective approach to following project management thought leaders is intentional selection rather than algorithmic default. LinkedIn's algorithm will surface the most-liked and most-shared content, which is not necessarily the most intellectually substantive. Building a reading and following list that genuinely develops your practice requires a deliberate curation that the algorithm will not do for you.

Start by identifying your two most significant professional development needs. If you are a PMO leader trying to demonstrate strategic value, Jen Skrabak, Lindsay Scott, and Bruno Morgante should be your first follows. If you are a practitioner trying to understand AI's practical impact on your work, Kathleen Walch, Ricardo Viana Vargas, and Mashhood Ahmed give you three distinct perspectives on the same question. If you are in the early stages of your career and navigating the profession without formal mentorship, Benjamin Chan, Jean Kang, and Christina Sookram offer coaching-oriented content designed for exactly that stage.

Next, add at least two voices from outside your immediate methodological tradition. If you work primarily in Agile environments, follow Jen Skrabak on portfolio governance or Joel Carboni on sustainability. If you work in waterfall or hybrid delivery, follow James Shore or Mike Griffiths for a rigorous Agile perspective that will challenge your assumptions about what Agile methodology can offer when implemented with discipline. The goal is not to convert your methodology but to expand your understanding of the options.

Then add at least one voice from a geography you are not currently reading. The Latin American PM community, represented here by Ricardo Viana Vargas, Americo Pinto, and Vanina Mangano, is growing rapidly and bringing distinctive perspectives on delivery under resource and infrastructure constraints. The Australian community, through Lynda Bourne, Elise Stevens, and Donna McGeorge, has strong traditions in stakeholder engagement and practitioner wellbeing. The European voices, including Henny Portman, Yasmina Khelifi, and Anne Gabrillagues, offer PRINCE2 and Agile perspectives that differ meaningfully from their US counterparts.

Finally, allocate specific time to reading rather than scrolling. A 20-minute daily commitment to reading one substantive piece from the voices on this list, rather than scanning a feed for headlines, will produce more genuine learning in a year than hours of passive LinkedIn consumption. Most of the thought leaders in this category maintain blogs, newsletters, podcasts, or communities where their longer-form thinking is more fully developed than a single LinkedIn post allows. Following at the post level is a beginning; engaging with the full body of work is where the real development happens.

If your organisation needs structured support for the leadership and team dynamics dimensions of project delivery, including the difficult conversations, accountability systems, and team cohesion work that determines whether project governance actually functions, Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, works with leadership teams around the world to address exactly these challenges. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss what a keynote, facilitated workshop, or executive offsite might look like for your organisation. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect.

Frequently Asked Questions

How was this list compiled?

Every person on this list was selected based on three criteria: substantive contribution to the field through published work, developed frameworks, or built communities; active original content creation in 2025 or 2026; and deliberate prioritisation of voices that may be less visible than the most prominent household names but are doing rigorous, relevant work. The list brings together practitioners, academics, coaches, educators, and community builders from six continents across seven disciplinary streams.

Who are the most influential people in project management right now?

The most influential voices vary significantly depending on the dimension of the profession you care about. For AI and strategy, Ricardo Viana Vargas and Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez have the most significant reach globally. For PMO governance and portfolio management, Kathleen Walch, Jen Skrabak, and Lindsay Scott have produced the most substantive and practically useful work. For human-centred and coaching-oriented PM, Elizabeth Harrin, Margaret Meloni, and Benjamin Chan have built the most significant practitioner communities.

How is AI changing project management and who is leading the thinking?

The most credible voices on AI in project management are distinguished by their practitioner grounding rather than their technical credentials. Kathleen Walch at PMI is developing the governance frameworks for AI-managed projects. Ricardo Viana Vargas and Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez co-authored the HBR article on AI transformation that set the terms of much subsequent debate. Mashhood Ahmed brings independent research credibility. Declan Foster addresses the ethical and human dimensions of AI in delivery contexts. All four are more useful references than the broader technology press on this specific question.

What certifications do the most respected project management thought leaders hold?

There is no single certification profile that distinguishes the voices on this list. PMP remains the most widely held credential, with many contributors also holding PMI-ACP, PfMP, PMI-RMP, PRINCE2, and various Agile certifications. What distinguishes the thought leaders from the certified practitioners is the combination of credentials with original thinking, community contribution, and practical delivery experience. Certification is a threshold requirement, not a differentiator.

Can I hire someone to facilitate project management or leadership workshops for my team?

For the leadership dimensions of project performance, including the difficult conversations between project managers and sponsors, the accountability gaps that affect delivery, and the team dynamics that determine whether project governance functions in practice, Jonno White is a globally delivered leadership consultant, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and keynote speaker who works with organisations of all types and sizes. Working Genius has been completed by more than 1.3 million people globally, and Jonno brings practical facilitation experience from schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to enquire about keynotes, workshops, or executive team offsites. Many organisations find that flying Jonno in costs significantly less than engaging high-profile local providers.

What is the difference between a project manager and a project management thought leader?

A project manager delivers projects. A thought leader advances how the profession understands and practises delivery, through writing, research, community building, framework development, or education that shapes the thinking and practice of other professionals. Most of the people on this list are both: practitioners whose thinking is grounded in delivery experience and who share that thinking in ways that improve the practice of others. The distinction matters because thought leadership without delivery experience tends toward abstraction, while delivery experience without reflection and communication tends not to generate the insights that advance the field.

What is the project economy?

The project economy is a concept developed by Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, describing the structural shift in how value is created in modern organisations, from ongoing operations toward discrete projects and programmes. It describes a world in which most significant organisational change, product development, and strategic execution happens through projects rather than through routine management. The concept has been widely adopted by PMI and has influenced how organisations think about the strategic importance of project management capability.

Final Thoughts

The 50 people on this list represent a profession at a genuine inflection point. The technical foundations of project management, methodology, governance, risk management, scheduling, are mature. The unsolved problems are human, strategic, and systemic: the strategy-execution gap that wastes trillions annually, the sustainability questions that conventional project delivery has not yet adequately answered, the AI transition that is reshaping what project managers are paid to do, and the leadership capability gap that determines whether all the methodology in the world actually produces outcomes.

Following the voices on this list is a practical investment in your professional development. Engaging seriously with the ideas of Joel Carboni on sustainable delivery, or Lavagnon Ika on why major projects fail at the scale they do, or Elizabeth Harrin on the human realities of managing multiple projects simultaneously, will change how you think about the work. And changing how you think about the work is, in the end, the only reliable way to change how you do it.

This is a living conversation. The people on this list are adding to it every week, through LinkedIn posts, newsletters, podcasts, conference talks, and books. The most useful thing you can do after reading this is not to follow all 50 at once, but to identify the three or four whose work is most relevant to where you are right now, read deeply, and then let that reading challenge you to practice differently.

For organisations looking to address the leadership foundations that determine whether projects succeed at the human level, including difficult conversations, team accountability, and the communication skills that project governance depends on, Jonno White is a bestselling author, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out, available at https://www.amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD, addresses the difficult people challenges that sit at the root of most project performance problems. Contact jonno@consultclarity.org to explore what Jonno can bring to your next leadership event. Whether virtual or face to face, international travel is often far more affordable than organisations expect.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read

For more on thought leadership across adjacent disciplines, check out Jonno's roundup of the best thought leaders in consulting globally at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/50-best-thought-leaders-in-consulting-2026.