Project Management on Ivan Luminaria

AI Manager and Project Management: when artificial intelligence enters the project

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 08:03:00 +0100

A few months ago, during a meeting with a banking client, the CTO said something that stuck with me.

“We need someone who manages AI. Not someone who uses it — someone who governs it.”

I nodded without speaking. Because that sentence, in seven seconds, described a role the market is looking for without yet knowing what to call it.

🧩 The fundamental misunderstanding #

There is a widespread confusion, and I see it in every project where AI enters the picture.

Payment at 60-90-120 days: the Italian normality that doesn't exist in Europe

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:03:00 +0100

The first time I worked with an international client, something strange happened. They paid me in thirty days.

Not thirty days from the end of the month. Not thirty days from the invoice receipt date stamped and countersigned by the administration manager. Thirty days from the invoice. Period.

I checked my bank statement twice. I thought it was a mistake.

It wasn’t a mistake. It was normality — just not Italian normality.

Bike vs Car in Rome: the morning that opened my eyes

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:03:00 +0100

Monday morning. Alarm at 6:40. Shower, quick breakfast, car keys on the table. I leave the house at 7:15.

I live in the Appio Latino neighbourhood. The office is on Via Crescenzio, in Prati. Eight kilometres as the crow flies. Should take fifteen minutes. In Rome, it’s a different story.

🚗 The morning by car #

Via Appia Nuova is already a car park. Porta San Giovanni, a funnel. Lungotevere, a funeral procession with horns.

Smart working in IT consulting: the numbers nobody wants to look at

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:03:00 +0100

6:47 AM on an ordinary Tuesday. I’m at the park near my house, running gear on. The air is fresh, the sun is barely rising. I’ve already done four kilometers. I feel alive.

By 7:00 I’m in the shower. By 7:20 I’m having a calm breakfast. By 7:45 I’m at my desk — fresh, focused, ready to work.

At that same hour, a colleague of mine is still stuck on the Pontina highway. Or on Rome’s ring road, somewhere between the Casilina and Tuscolana exits. Phone in hand — not to work, but to send the usual message: “Sorry, running late, there’s been an accident.”

When chaos becomes method: AI and GitHub to manage a project nobody wanted to touch

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 08:03:00 +0100

A client calls me. Tense voice, measured words.

“Ivan, we have a problem. Actually, we have the problem.”

I know that tone. It’s the tone of someone who has already tried to fix things internally, failed, and is now looking for someone to tell them the truth without beating around the bush.

The problem is a management software — not a website, not an app — a critical system running important business processes. It’s a few years old. It grew fast, as always happens when business runs faster than architecture. And now everything has piled up: open bugs that nobody closes, change requests that nobody plans, developers working on different versions of the code without knowing what the others are doing.

Standup meetings: why they only work if they last 15 minutes

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 08:03:00 +0100

First Monday of the project. New team, new methodology, new hopes. The PM proposes a daily standup. Everyone nods. “Fifteen minutes, standing up, three questions. Simple.”

The first week works. At 9:15 it starts, by 9:28 everyone is back at their desk. Each person speaks for two minutes, blockers are flagged, people move on. Pure efficiency.

The second week someone raises a hand mid-round: “Can I quickly explain the problem I’m having with the integration?” Five minutes of technical discussion between two people. The other six stand there listening to something that doesn’t concern them.

The Yes-And technique: how I defused a meeting that was about to blow up

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 08:03:00 +0100

It was a Thursday afternoon, one of those meetings that was supposed to last an hour on paper. Seven of us, connected on a call. The agenda was straightforward: decide the migration strategy for an Oracle database from on-premise to cloud.

Straightforward, sure. On paper.

Twenty minutes in, the meeting had turned into a duel.

🔥 The spark #

On one side was the infrastructure manager. Experienced, twenty years of datacenters behind him. His position was rock-solid: lift-and-shift migration, zero changes to the architecture, we move everything as-is.

4 million euros, two multinationals, zero software: the true story of a failure foretold

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 08:03:00 +0100

The story I’m about to tell is true. I won’t name names — not out of diplomacy, but because names don’t matter. What matters is understanding the mechanism. Because this mechanism repeats itself, identically, in dozens of companies. And it costs millions.

🏢 The client: an insurance group with a legitimate ambition #

A solid company in the insurance sector. Operations in Italy, France, Northern European countries, Spain. Thousands of employees, millions of policies under management, a growing business.