So you’ve just started a new project, and you’re not sure what you’re supposed to create. Do you need a project charter? Or will a Terms of Reference (ToR) do the job?

The challenge is that neither document has a single universal definition, so if you join a new company and find they use ToRs instead of Charters, then it can be hard to know what they are act...

I learned to write a Terms of Reference by copying someone else's, and luckily for me, it wasn’t a bad example. I also remember looking at a lot of ToR templates online and then deleting a lot of the placeholder headers which I didn’t think would work for my environment.

However, if you’re starting from a rubbish internal template, the same vague, unhelpful ...

If you work as a project manager in professional services — consulting, accounting, engineering, advisory — you already know that people are the business. Unlike product companies or manufacturers, your revenue lives entirely in the time, skills, and availability of the team. Get that wrong and you're either turning down work you could have taken or burning people out...

Financial compliance isn’t just the CFO’s problem. If you’re managing projects in a regulated sector, overseeing vendor contracts, or running procurement cycles, you’re already operating in compliance territory, whether you realize it or not.

The challenge is that most project management training glosses over the financial governance layer. You’ll learn abou...