Project Innovators – Matthew Moran, The Open University

In the ‘Project Innovators’ season of podcasts, Project journal editor Emma De Vita is speaking to project professionals who are leading projects in an innovative way at a time when many of us are hoping the world of work and projects can be reset for a post-COVID-19 world. In this episode she speaks to Matthew Moran, Head of Transformation at The Open University, and occasional lecturer in the OU Business School. Matthew is one of the educators on the ‘Project Management: Beyond the Basics’ course on FutureLearn, a collaboration between the OU and APM. He is also an advisor and consultant to a number of education institutions and edtech startups and companies.  Matthew is writing a book on hybrid project management for APM, aiming to help project managers to do hybrid better. Instead of being irreconcilable opposites, he argues that project managers need both linear and agile for projects of any degree of complexity – and that the best results are achieved when we acknowledge the need for both, and when we aim to get the best of both (by understanding and making trade-offs between the upsides and downsides of each).