Built for the leaders who are done
accepting that projects fail, and consistently
Achieve P3M is a specialist consulting firm focused on one problem: the gap between organisational strategy and the delivery systems designed to execute it.
We work with executive teams, boards, and project organisations to understand why delivery is falling short, build the capability to close that gap, and create the conditions for sustained high performance, in a world where AI is reshaping what project leadership means.
Our practice is built on evidence, not opinion. We draw on more than 30 years of independent research into project outcomes, combined with direct consulting experience and technology transformation programs.
Daniela Kellett
Director, Achieve P3M
Daniela has delivered projects and programs and managed portfolios since 2010, across government, law enforcement, telecommunications, utilities, insurance and superannuation.
She delivers IT software, systems integration, data platforms and IT infrastructure projects and programmes. Her advisory work reaches wider still, taking PMO establishment, portfolio governance and delivery capability uplift into organisations well beyond technology, including civil engineering and design and construct.
She has run large technology portfolios, directed programs, led technical teams and built PMOs from scratch. She has secured funding for capital projects through business cases endorsed by executive directors and agreed by boards. That is the experience sitting behind the advice.
Today she works at the intersection of project leadership, capability development and AI-enabled delivery, bringing standards rigour, practical depth and an honest perspective to every engagement. Her work is anchored in PMBoK, the APM Body of Knowledge, IPMA ICB4 and P3O, alongside Agile practice.
She hosts Powering ProjeX, a podcast for project professionals who want the honest conversation about what makes delivery work, and builds Alliora.AI, where she tests how AI can act as a practical project ally inside delivery rather than another tool to administer.
Daniela also volunteers with IPMA Australia, where she developed the strategy for the inaugural 2026 conference, project managed the event and delivered its AI workshop.
She is also a former President and Councillor of the AIPM Victorian Chapter Council, led the PMO Community of Practice and was a former member of its Professional Advancement Committee.
In 2021 she received a Medal of Acknowledgement from the Governor General of Australia for volunteer service to AIPM.
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Fellow, IPMA Australia
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Certified Practising Project Director (CPPD), Australian Institute of Project Management (AIPM)
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Chartered Project Professional (ChPP), Association for Project Management (APM), United Kingdom
THE PODCAST
Powering ProjeX: From Vision to Victory
Daniela also hosts Powering ProjeX: From Vision to Victory.
This podcast exists for project professionals who want to understand the real story behind delivery success and failure, not the sanitised version.
Each episode explores what it actually takes to make projects work: the honest conversations about governance, capability, leadership, AI, and the human factors that the textbooks rarely address. Guests include project directors, researchers, PMO leaders, and practitioners from across Australia and beyond.
The podcast is the foundation of the Achieve P3M research and insights practice. Every episode contributes to the evidence base behind the Achieve Delivery Maturity Framework: and to the community of project professionals who are done with the conventional wisdom that isn't working.
Listen to Powering ProjeX on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
Our Philosophy
Here is what the data consistently shows; across more than 20 independent studies and three decades of evidence
Achieve P3M does not operate on assumption or convention. Every service, every assessment, and every recommendation is grounded in independent research into what actually determines whether projects succeed or fail.
The findings are clear and they are not what most organisations expect.
0.5%
of projects deliver on time, on budget and on benefits (Flyvbjerg, How Big Things Get Done, 2023)
36%
software projects are delivered on time, on budget and to scope (Standish Group CHAOS, 2015)
5x
small, well-scoped projects (61%) more likely to succeed versus large ones (11%) (Standish Group CHAOS, 2015)
18%
large projects succeed just 18% even when run with agile. Size and scope outweigh methodology (Standish Group CHAOS, 2015)
Not significant
the difference in project success rates between agile, hybrid and predictive approaches (PMI Pulse of the Profession, 2024)
What we believe
Thirteen principles. One consistent argument.
These findings shape everything about how Achieve P3M works. Our practice is built on thirteen principles, organised across four dimensions of delivery performance.
Optimise for the Whole
A process decision that benefits one project at the expense of the portfolio is not a good decision. Optimisation always works at the level of strategic outcomes.
Radical Truth and Transparency
A delivery system built on managed information produces managed failure, slowly and expensively. An honest assessment of delivery reality is the first act of good project leadership.
Codify Decision Frameworks
Good decisions require agreed criteria established before the pressure arrives. Codified frameworks remove politics from investment choices and make decision quality consistent across the organisation.
Feedback Loops: Make It Quick
In-flight feedback, not just post-project review, is the discipline that determines whether problems are corrected in time or simply explained at project closure with the benefit of hindsight.
Prioritise Ruthlessly
Doing fewer things well, with genuine leadership, delivery and resource capacity behind each one, consistently outperforms spreading the organisation thin across everything that felt important at the point of project approval.
Keep It Small, Iterative and Modular
Small, well-scoped projects succeed at more than five times the rate of large ones (61% versus 11%, Standish CHAOS 2015). Keeping work small and modular is not caution: it is the size and scope discipline the evidence most consistently rewards. Learn to run programs well or expect sub-par outcomes.
Competencies and Skills
The project manager with fifteen years of experience may have had one year of experience fifteen times. Capability requires deliberate skills development, not just accumulated time in a role.
Bring Clever People Together
Delivery excellence is not an individual sport. The right expertise, deliberately assembled and genuinely empowered, solves problems that talented individuals working in isolation simply cannot.
No Dumb Requirements and Energy Suckers
Every hour spent delivering a requirement that should never have existed is pure waste. Requirements must be real, owned, aligned to benefits, testable, and formally approved before any work begins.
Time Under Pressure Builds Diamonds
Projects are time-boxed activities, not ongoing operations that roll from one end-date to the next. Deadline accountability and meeting rigor must be deliberately designed into the project and led: they do not emerge on their own.
Respect Trumps Status
The most expensive mistake in project delivery is the difficult conversation that did not happen or was avoided due to status and perceived influence. Respect for the work creates conditions for honesty that hierarchy suppresses. Respect the work over any one person's affluence.
Consistency Beats Perfection
A sound yet flexible process applied reliably to every project, with consistent feedback loops, produces a learning organisation. A perfect process applied selectively to flagship projects produces nothing repeatable or scalable.
Always Solve for the Limiting Factor
The primary accountability of a project leader is not to report on constraints but to resolve them. Find the limiting factor and remove it.
The objective is to learn,
not just to deliver
Project management has a paradox at its heart.
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After 30 years of methodology development, standards evolution, certification growth, and technology investment, failure rates have barely moved. The profession has become more sophisticated but the results have not.
We believe this is because organisations keep solving the wrong problem. They invest in methodology, yet PMI found the difference in performance between predictive, hybrid and agile approaches to be not statistically significant (PMI, Pulse of the Profession 2024). The real levers are human and organisational: how leaders sponsor, how teams make decisions, how capability is developed, and how organisations learn from what goes wrong.
That last point is where most organisations fail most. Ask any PMO Director whether their organisation captures lessons learned. They will say yes. Ask whether those lessons are stored in a searchable, structured system that future teams can actually leverage and the answer is mostly likely crickets. Lessons live in project folders buried in SharePoint, written in formats nobody queries, and read by few after the project closes. The consequence is predictable: the same mistakes, made repeatedly, project after project, year after year. And when the contractors who learned what worked move-on to the next engagement, the learnings walk out the door with them. ​
There is a cultural layer beneath all of this that is rarely discussed honestly. Post-project reviews are sanitised. Failure is described in passive language that removes accountability. The difficult conversations about poor sponsorship, under-qualified leadership, and dysfunctional governance happen in private and disappear from the official record, and capability gaps are never fully addressed.
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The shift we advocate is not complicated: make failure discussions regular and structured, and a mandatory part of project delivery. Not optional, not comfortable, but necessary. Make it an honest and in the moment expose of what is happening now, with a forward-looking decision point on what needs to be done to avoid it moving forward. And, most importantly, take action to fix the processes and procedures that don't work well and circumvent optimal outcomes.
This is what we mean when we say the objective is to learn, not just to deliver. Delivery without learning is an organisation that runs in circles fast. Learning is what turns every project experience into organisational capability. Capability is what makes the next project better than the last.
The key is to understand, every project in the portfolio is a promise to our shareholders, investors, customers and community. We all own strategic outcomes. So, make it your practice to learn to deliver on your promises.
Our Standards
Grounded in international best practice
PMBoK (Project Management Body of Knowledge): PMI
IPMA Individual Competence Baseline (ICB)
APM Body of Knowledge
AIPM Professional Competency Standards
Agile and hybrid delivery frameworks
We believe frameworks are tools, not religions. What matters is how mature your organisation is at applying whatever framework it uses:
and whether your leaders have the judgement to adapt it to context.
What we don't do
We don't sell methodology change.
If your delivery is struggling, the answer is almost certainly not a new framework, it is an honest diagnosis of what is actually going wrong.
We don't create ongoing consulting dependency. Every engagement is designed to leave your organisation more capable than it was before we arrived.
Likewise, we are selective about the engagements we take on, because the work we do requires genuine depth, not a standard playbook applied at scale. Albeit we have those too – best practice isn’t rocket science.
Lastly, every Achieve P3M engagement is designed to build internal capability, not dependency on external support. The best result we can achieve is a client who no longer needs us because they’ve built the capability to deliver well themselves.