VPM Works! is here because the data is clear: the tools don't work. Projects are late, customers are unhappy, stakeholders are disappointed, and developers are discouraged. People work for years without a single project delivering to expectations.
Here's what 35 years of product development teaches you: the way most organizations manage projects is fundamentally broken.
The numbers are brutal. Across industries, no more than 30% of new product development projects deliver on time. Not because the engineers aren't talented. Not because the scientists aren't brilliant. Not because the project managers aren't working hard enough.
Because the methods are wrong.
Gantt charts were designed in the 1950s for construction — fixed scope, sequential work, minimal iteration. Product development is the opposite: requirements evolve, teams work in parallel, learning is continuous. Yet we keep forcing a construction tool onto an innovation problem and then blame the people when it doesn't work.
Project managers plan in isolation, then hand the plan to teams who had no voice in creating it — and wonder why there's no buy-in. Dependencies multiply into spaghetti that is not maintained over time. Meanwhile, critical handoffs hide in the noise, often shifting silently while the team stares at an obsolete chart. Problems fester for weeks because the tools can't surface them in real time.
VPM Works! exists to end this pattern.
George Ellis has spent his career where methodology meets reality — on the factory floor, in the engineering lab, and in the room where the schedule just slipped again.
At Danaher, one of the world's foremost lean companies, he watched Toyota Production System principles transform manufacturing. But when he tried to apply those same principles to product development — to the engineers, scientists, and project managers who "think for a living" — the existing tools fell apart. Gantt charts couldn't handle uncertainty. Critical path analysis assumed a single path that never stayed critical. Agile solved the software team's problem but left everyone else guessing when deliverables would arrive.
Visual Project Management has been practiced under various names and in various forms across industry for years — but no one had codified it. There's no PMI standard for VPM. No PMBOK chapter. No Prince2-style framework. Every organization that discovers visual methods reinvents them from scratch, and the results diverge wildly. VPM Works™ exists to fix that — to define a comprehensive, consistent methodology that works across all product development projects the way Gantt and CPM are defined by their respective bodies.
The results speak: on-time delivery rates jumping from 30% to 85%. Revenue targets met. Developer engagement rising because people finally feel ownership over a plan they helped create. Voluntary attrition dropping because talented people stop leaving organizations that stop wasting their time.
VPM Works is the next step — taking everything learned in decades of practice and making it accessible to every team, everywhere. Open methodology. Open knowledge base. Software tools designed for the way projects actually work.
Every project team deserves access to techniques that actually deliver — not locked behind expensive consultants, buried in academic papers, or hidden inside companies that treat process knowledge as competitive advantage. VPM Works publishes everything. The methodology is here, in the open, because hoarding knowledge that could help people is a waste we refuse to tolerate.
The current chaos — every organization reinventing its own flavor of "how we manage projects" — creates waste, not agility. No project management body takes responsibility for standardizing visual methods, so teams diverge needlessly. VPM Works fills that gap: a common visual language that any team can adopt, adapt, and build on, without starting from scratch every time.
Theory is cheap. We only include techniques that have been tested in real organizations, with real teams, under real deadlines. Every method in the VPM Works knowledge base has been road-tested across dozens of development organizations. If it didn't survive contact with reality, it didn't make the cut. No exceptions.
The complete methodology — theory of operation, planning process, execution framework, problem-solving methods, and Kanban for sustaining projects. Open and growing.
A modern platform purpose-built for Visual Project Management. Swim lane visualization, fever charts, team scoreboards, and AI-assisted planning — designed for the way projects actually work.
Partnering with engineering schools to teach VPM methodology to the next generation of project managers and product developers.
Dive into the methodology, read the books, or get in touch. The old way isn't working. This one does.