About SSLM — and a bit about me

My reason for building this website is three-fold.

First, I wanted to bring my project management knowledge, experience and 20-odd years of templates, frameworks, guidance documents and thought papers into one consolidated framework. I'm conceited enough to think I could — and, as you'll read below, Claude was invaluable in making it happen.

Second, I wanted the templates to be accessible for people to use — including me. You'd be surprised (or perhaps not) how many organisations don't have a workable project management framework with a complete set of artefacts. I kept finding myself re-creating these on the various projects and PMOs I worked on, when what I really wanted to do was get stuck into the project.

Third, I wanted to give new project professionals a foundational toolkit and a simple model — to help them learn about projects, and to offer a glimpse of what their role could evolve into. If that's you: good luck!

Many years ago, I had a hobby making short films. These “shorts” were typically three to four minutes long, and I was lucky enough to have them shown on TV and before feature films at the Oasis cinemas, a chain with locations across the UK — a fact I'm still proud of. I remember sitting in my local Oasis in Notting Hill, watching the first screening of my first short on the big screen, and the real thrill of listening to the audience react.

As much as I enjoyed the creativity of writing and directing, I was fascinated by the production side: finding the financing, then pulling together the actors and equipment, getting everyone on location at the right time, and working through the processing, editing, marketing and distribution.

That's where my interest in professional project management began. I appreciated — without formally understanding it — that getting things done takes organisation and process: a sequence of steps and complementary tools that make a project run more efficiently with each iteration.

So I started doing project management courses. Each had its own philosophy and approach, and they all assumed a level of experience I didn't have. None of them really gave me an insight into how a newbie — an ignoramus like me, at the time — actually started and ran a project. (Possibly I was just too thick to extrapolate the practical from the theory in my head.) Thankfully, I soon got myself onto a “real” project, and that's when the true learning began.

I was hired on a short-term contract as a project coordinator, supporting a Project Manager and a Business Analyst on a regulatory project in Financial Services. The role was meant to run for a year, until the bank decided the project wasn't actually required. The project was closed after six months, but I had learnt a lot — and took that early knowledge straight onto another project, this time as project manager, on another regulatory project. It was far more complex: a scope across five international regions, a diverse cast of stakeholders, cultures and languages, and over 15,000 processes to be written, standardised, version-controlled and set up for annual review, with final approval of the whole thing by the regulator. We did it — and got a lovely gold star from the regulator.

This is a good moment to talk about two ideas: Dunning-Kruger, and “fake it till you make it”.

Back to that project. I knew I was organised. I understood how to build a schedule with a few milestones on a critical path, how to populate and manage a RAID log, and how to produce a weekly report for my boss, the Head of Operations. I read the requirements, the business case and the regulator's findings carefully, so I knew the objective — and I understood how the project met a strategic goal of the organisation: to have a formal system of process management (or, really, to avoid being flagged and fined by the regulator).

Here's what I did:

The point I want to make is this: a basic understanding and a few foundational tools you know how to use will get you started. That's why I put this framework together. It gives you a fairly straightforward information-flow model and the templates you need to get going. You add the rest as your project — and the project-management ecosystem around it — grows more complex. A high-level project plan, a RAID log and a weekly report will get you started, and take you further than you'd think. The rest comes down to your confidence, your critical thinking, and your ability to think ahead.

This website wouldn't have been possible without Claude (the Opus 4.8 version). I brought Claude two project management models I'd been working on — a Simple Project Management model, and the SSLM framework — each with fifty or so templates, guidance notes and thought papers built up over more than twenty years. They were comparable models, with the Simple one informing SSLM. With its ability to hold and analyse a great deal of information at once, Claude helped me consolidate SSLM, working through the inconsistencies, contradictions and gaps. Then came the website — a long, iterative process of refinement, with Claude helping me work through the ideas and the presentation of each page (and the whole) to pull it together into a reasonably complete and practical framework I hope is useful to established professionals and newcomers alike.

I'd also like to thank all of the people I have worked with and studied with over my professional life. I have benefited immensely from learning from the good, the bad and the occasional ugly. Especially early on, I had bosses and leaders who took the time to show me how things were done, modelled behaviours, gave me opportunities to stretch, and the chance to learn from my mistakes. I've also worked in really good teams and learned a lot from the teams I have led.

I have learned so much from all of you. Thank you.