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.
The project failures described on this site are not hypothetical. They are lived problems from real programs, including the pattern in A Five-Minute Decision Cost Us Three Months.
George Ellis spent a large part of his career inside Danaher, one of the world's most successful lean organizations. Danaher began building the Danaher Business System (DBS) in the 1980s based on Toyota Production System principles, and that operating model shaped how he learned to improve performance.
In one R&D organization, the team ran a broader lean transformation. But in the first six months, the dominant execution change was Visual Project Management (VPM). During that period, on-time delivery improved from about 30% to 85%, and the organization sustained that level for years.
Over time, the broader lean system delivered additional gains: fewer late projects, lower voluntary attrition, and higher engagement. So the full transformation was bigger than one method, but VPM was the breakthrough lever that improved delivery reliability first.
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.