Building the system that cracks it — in public.

I’m Jon. I run prajekt. Short version: I’m a working project manager who got tired of watching capable people stall the moment their scope crossed from “a project” into “a program.”

I’m PMP and PMI-ACP certified. I’ve read PMI’s full body of knowledge cover to cover — not to memorise it, but to figure out which of it survives contact with a real delivery calendar. Most of it does. The problem isn’t the content; it’s the density and the abstraction. So I translate it.

I’m publicly working toward the PgMP after failing it twice. I don’t hide that. It’s the reason this exists: the exam demands a way of thinking that the source material only gestures at, and the study material on the market largely repackages the standard instead of teaching the shift. I’m building the system that cracks it, and shipping it as I go.

I’ve spent 10+ years delivering complex programs. Now I’m making the hard part learnable.

I’m Jon McFadden — a project and program manager with more than a decade of turning messy, high-stakes initiatives into delivered outcomes. My path ran from B2B and B2C sales into customer success, and then into global project and operations delivery at Michelin, where I led end-to-end initiatives across cross-functional teams — on time, on budget, and through the kind of complexity most people never see. Along the way, that work has spanned manufacturing, logistics, insurance, real estate, and SaaS.

I hold a PMP and a PMI-ACP, an MBA, and a BS in Mathematics. But the credential that shaped this whole project is the one I haven’t passed yet: the PgMP. I’ve sat for it twice and come up short. Instead of walking away, I did what I do with every hard system — broke it down, built a method, and started teaching it back. That’s where prajekt comes from.

Here’s what I believe: the answers to running programs well already exist. PMI has written them down across thousands of pages of standards. The problem is that almost no one translates that body of knowledge into something you can use on a Monday. Capable project managers get promoted into program and portfolio roles with no map, then left to manage real complexity by instinct.

I’ve read the standards — all of them — and I’m turning them into plain-English systems: for passing the hardest exams, for leading programs that actually realize their benefits, and for using AI to do the work better. I build these tools because I needed them myself.

I care about this because I’m wired to. I love to learn, to sharpen a method until it works, and to hand it to someone else so they can win too. If that’s the kind of guide you’ve been looking for, you’re in the right place.

What I do here

I write a weekly newsletter that takes one PMI standard, or one hard-to-apply concept from it, and translates it into something you can use Monday. No frameworks-for-frameworks’-sake. No hype about AI — but a serious ongoing thread on what it means for the PMO.

I also build interactive tools like the program diagnostic: quick, honest, and designed to make you decide something concrete about your next move.

What I won’t do

I won’t reproduce PMI’s copyrighted text, figures, or process diagrams. I refer to standards by name and teach the substance in my own words. If you want the source material, buy it from PMI. If you want it translated into something usable, that’s what I’m here for.