PM Academy · Onsite #1
Session Recap · Onsite #1 Kickoff
Nashville
Education and Healthcare teams from Nashville, Baltimore, and Jeffersonville met in one room for Onsite #1, with Alexa Busby joining live from her desk.
PM Academy · Onsite #1
Session Recap · Onsite #1 Kickoff
Education and Healthcare teams from Nashville, Baltimore, and Jeffersonville met in one room for Onsite #1, with Alexa Busby joining live from her desk.
Session Summary
Three offices and two studios worked in one room. Nashville, Baltimore, and Jeffersonville came together for the first time, Education and Healthcare side by side, and spent the day taking the same three ideas apart and putting them back together in their own way.
Establishing Clarity
The paper-airplane round made the lesson physical. Leaders launched without the instruction key, and “Step 5” had no clean answer, by design. The mandate that fell out of it: get extreme clarity early, intercept what the pursuit team actually sold and promised, and challenge any instruction that doesn’t make sense before you act on it.
Controlling Advancement
Sorting 45 responsibility cards across five phases and three streams made pace visible and discussable. Once the consistency gaps were marked, the point was clear: prioritization is the discipline. A project manager chooses what not to do, names the risk, and tracks what it sets off downstream.
Protecting Integrity
When each gap was tagged process, behavioral, or tool, most of them landed on behavioral. The know-how is already there. The habit is what we are building. Integrity is closing that gap: holding the work product, the client relationship, the business outcome, and the team together so none of them quietly slips.
The takeaway
Every PM call is a business call. The afternoon’s discussion asked whether the money is the #1 priority. It settled where it always does: manage to balanced targets. The firm’s financial health is the sum of how each project gets run.
The tables produced a journey up a mountain, a caped turtle, a butterfly, and three overlapping circles. Four different drawings carried the same three instincts underneath, and the three offices left as one.
Participant Artifacts
Four tables produced four metaphors for the same job. One went to the firm-wide championship.
An uphill climb from open water to the summit. The client ship, marked “C”, sets out, and the team ropes together across a ridgeline of Grace waypoints, each a lighthouse-topped house marked “G,” bridging the gap between peaks until the whole crew reaches the house at the top.
Teamwork · Client value · Clarity · Bridging the gaps · Reaching the summit together
M.I.L.O.: Meet, Inspire, Learn, Optimize. A caped, G-chested hero with a hand on every lever at once: the clock for time, the cash for the budget, the rolled-up sheet for the design.
Meet · Inspire · Learn · Optimize · Time · Budget · Design
The PM as a transformation. A caterpillar dreaming of “Milo” emerges as a butterfly whose wings carry the whole job: palette, scales, books, skyline, lightbulb, dollar, standing for design, balance, knowledge, delivery, ideas, value.
Design · Balance · Knowledge · Delivery · Ideas · Value
A Venn of the streams that overlap on every project: glasses for clarity, a compass for direction, a handshake for the client and team, the dollars and the rising arrow for the business. All of them meet at the center, where a listening ear marked “G” holds it together.
Clarity · Direction · Client · Team · Business · Listening
Brought to Life
The room’s pick, reimagined in motion and built to the Grace brand’s animation standard.