Welcome to the Operaneum — where management meets opera. Here, projects become performances, portfolios the season's line-up, and stakeholders ensemble members who don't always sing from the same score. Premiere or patch-up, grand strategy or silent catastrophe backstage — at the Operaneum, everything you know from your day-to-day project life finally gets the stage it deserves. With poise, with perspective, and a wink from the box. Curtain up.
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Say «PMO» in any meeting and two things happen: half the room rolls its eyes — spreadsheets, bureaucracy, control mania — while the other half sees the invisible force that keeps productions from drowning in creative chaos. This episode takes a side. It's about the tenor who arrives for opening night while his sheet music doesn't. About a Carmen where the orchestra plays tragedy while the stage shows a tender embrace. And about a Meistersinger that, without a keeper of the schedule, would run eight hours straight. In short: the PMO as assistant director, not bureaucracy machine — the silent conductor behind the scenes. Because in the end there are only two kinds of productions: the ones that look staged, and the ones that actually are.
5 Oct 2026
Five Acts, a Ballet, and the Last Tram Home: Scope Management
Paris, spring of 1867. On the stage of the Opéra stands a work in which everything is right: five acts, the finest cast on the continent, a ballet exactly where custom demands one. Only one thing is wrong — the clock. A few streets away, the last train to the suburbs leaves shortly after midnight, and whoever misses it walks home. What happened in those final rehearsals is the most honest lesson on project scope the theater has to offer.
23 Sept 2026
The Trial – Budget Management
Silence, fire, water. Three trials decide who enters the temple in Mozart’s «Magic Flute». This week the opera turns 235. And in Stuttgart, officials have just decided to hold a trial of their own. The opera house renovation, once pegged at one billion euros, now looks closer to two. Renovate, relocate, or rebuild? The question is right. The rules are still missing. And Papageno is already chatting.
21 Sept 2026
One Sentence That Binds: Program Charter
One sentence sits at the front of the printed season brochure that goes out to every subscriber. Before it got there, an Intendant rewrote it twelve times and defended it three times in front of a board that nodded politely and kept asking questions anyway. That sentence is not marketing copy. It is a commitment she will be measured against twelve months later. Anyone curious what a program charter actually does should watch one being written.
7 Sept 2026
The Silence Before the First Rehearsal: Program
Twelve empty squares on a wall. One year. Not a single title. On her first day in office, a newly appointed Intendant stands in front of her season schedule and needs a full hour to work out what her job actually is. What she figures out in that hour explains a distinction that project management still gets wrong on a regular basis. Between the single evening and the decade sits a layer almost nobody owns.
24 Aug 2026
The House That Plays Everything and Stands for Nothing: Portfolio Strategy
Two opera houses. Same city, same budget, same ensemble. One can be described in a single sentence. The other has a full calendar — and no strategy. This episode is about the difference between a season that is a list and a season that is an argument: why a house that plays for everyone plays for no one in particular, why balance is not a direction, and why the only honest strategy paper an organization owns is not its mission statement. It's the calendar.
10 Aug 2026
What a Drama!
Chaos wears a tuxedo today.
Big visions. A wildly mixed cast. Expectations up in the gods—and the inevitable chaos backstage. Sounds familiar? Exactly.
As an opera lover, I eventually realised: projects are simply dramas with a Gantt chart.
The artistic director has the vision. The conductor holds the tempo. The singers deliver. And reality writes its own arias: delays, budget cuts, and “one small creative idea” five minutes before the dress rehearsal.
In opera as in projects, timing, collaboration, and steady nerves decide whether you get applause.
29 Jul 2026
Two Hundred Scores, Twelve Nights: Portfolio Management
Two hundred scores on the general director's desk. Twelve nights in the calendar. The math doesn't work — and it never will. That's not a problem to be solved; that's the job. This episode is about the desk that matters more than the stage: why a house can produce every opera flawlessly and still fail, what separates a project from a program from a portfolio, and why the most important list in the building is the list of what does not get played.
15 Jul 2026
The Sack Arrived on Time: The Masterplan
In Verdi's Rigoletto, a murder is planned with the precision of a logistics manager. Body in a sack, handover at midnight, everything on schedule. The delivery arrives exactly on time, the process is flawless — only the body in the sack is the wrong one. It's the jester's own daughter. In this episode: why projects that hit every milestone can still deliver the wrong thing — and what a real plan answers besides the question "when."
14 Jul 2026
When the Chandelier Falls: Risk and Problem
In one rarely performed opera, doom hangs over the stage from the very first scene. Nobody says it aloud — but the music leaves no doubt: something here is going to go wrong. Not maybe. Certainly. The only question is when. Projects are no different. In this episode: how to read your risks before the thunderclap, name a problem before the whole town is burning, and keep your team steady when the chandelier finally falls.
11 Jul 2026
Who Sings, Who Stays Silent, Who Pulls the Strings: Stakeholder
Leporello has the most famous list in all of opera. Six hundred and forty in Italy, a thousand and three in Spain — a perfect stakeholder register. The only problem: his master never cared about a single name on it. We know how that ends. The floor opens, and hell does the rest. In this episode: why the stakeholder you don't hear today is the one who sets the final chord tomorrow — and how that plays out across projects, programs and entire portfolios.
9 Jul 2026
Overture: Charter
The Project Charter: What a Wagner Overture Teaches About Starting Right
One chord. A hundred and thirty-six bars. Not a single word spoken — and yet everyone in the hall already knows what kind of evening this will be. That is what an overture does. And it is exactly what a project charter should do, long before the first sprint. In this episode: why the most-skipped document in project management is the one that decides whether your project ends in applause — or as a permanent construction site.
7 Jul 2026
Playbill: Topics
Welcome to the Operaneum — where every project is a production.
Projects, programmes and portfolios aren't just numbers, plans and status reports. They're stagings — with grand visions, precarious plot twists, commanding entrances, and that very particular drama that always unfolds behind the scenes. The tenor loses his voice, and it's called risk management. The set jams mid-scene, warm regards from the critical path. And somewhere a prima donna is out-arguing the director so ferociously that every stakeholder workshop sounds like polite chamber music by comparison. Opera, after all, isn't chaos — it's the high art of arranging chaos until, by the final curtain, it sounds like a triumph. Over this season we'll take our seats in the box and watch it all: which pieces make the programme, who's needed when, and what happens the moment the production starts to falter. So let's direct the drama — before the drama directs us.
Curtain up.
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