Timing is everything…

How Tacitum works

1. Assess

   A guided self-assessment captures how your portfolio is actually governed: which forums meet, how often, what triggers an escalation, and who decides. Tacit rules that sit silently in the data of your projects, rules which have never been written and which may be unknown to those ruled by them, emerge from their hiding places to form a clear picture of how you really work.

2. Register

   Each person knows a piece of those rules, but nobody sees the whole. Tacitum assembles the pieces from the artifacts your people already keep, and the result works like a Rosetta Stone, translating the strategy your leaders state into the timing your portfolio actually keeps. Tacitum turns the assessment into a machine-readable register of rules for cadence, thresholds, and synchronization. Every rule is visible, versioned, and owned by a named person.

3. Operate

   Tacitum is not a consulting firm. Your self-assessment is the boot sequence for a suite of agents deployed seamlessly by you on-prem or in your own cloud. An AI agent for each portfolio practice, from prioritizing to controlling, proposes and carries out work. A synchronizing core checks every action against the register. That core is deterministic code, not a language model, so the rules hold even when a model errs.

One escalation, end to end

A worked example, drawn from the self-assessment of a multinational manufacturer with names and figures changed. Each step names who acts: an agent, the synchronizing core, a person, or the gateway. The rule codes are the register's own.

1. Controlling agent

   A forecast crosses the line

   At the biweekly progress review, the Controlling agent reads the ERP through a read-only connector: line 3's forecast is 12 percent over the approved budget. It drafts the change-log entry. It cannot act on it.

2. Synchronizing core

   The register disposes of it

   Rule THR-21, owned by the head of investment control, absorbs variance below 10 percent and interrupts above 25. A 12 percent reading, held for one project cycle, is disposed wait: the core opens an obligation on the investment committee, due within one of its cycles.

3. Synchronizing core

   Routed by the calendar

   Wait means the next scheduled sitting. The committee sits monthly, 14 days away, so the item joins that agenda with its status report due five working days before. Above 25 percent, the core would have called an off-cycle sitting within one project cycle.

4. Composing and Prioritizing agents

   Options, not decisions

   The Composing agent drafts two options and flags the coupled project. The Prioritizing agent may note a re-ranking but may not enact one: no rule grants mid-year authority, so the core withholds the action.

5. Committee chair

   One person ratifies

   The chair ratifies option A at the November sitting. Who decided, when, and under which rule are recorded and content-addressed under UOR-ADDR, so the decision can be proven later.

6. Gateway, then two agents

   Executed, then learned

   The gateway writes the ratified baseline to the ERP and records the tool's reply. The Measuring agent resets the benefit baseline; the Learning agent files the lesson against the trigger that caused it.

Six records, one chain. The agents never held authority over the baseline; the chair did, on the record.

What the customer sees

Most people in the organization will never open Tacitum. What they will see is the work of nine practice agents. Each agent is paired with a named person, its human counterpart, and works for that person around the clock: it drafts everything its practice owes to the practices downstream of it, the person approves, and only then does it go. In plainer words, the agent is a companion that prepares; the person decides what leaves.

The decks, dashboards, and papers for every project, program, and portfolio meeting are generated continuously from the systems of record, so no sitting waits on a pack and no pack is older than the morning. Alerts are written for the person who needs them and arrive through the tools that person already uses, whether that is Teams, Slack, email, or a text message.

Four screens sit behind that work.

Example data throughout. The Assess screen is redrawn from the live instrument; Companion, Register, and Operate are designs for 2027.

Who this is for

Everyone who runs a portfolio or depends on one. Governance is a shared function, so Tacitum is licensed per organization or portfolio rather than per seat.

• The people doing the work

  Those who select, prioritize, and terminate the portfolio's endeavors; who ideate, compose, and measure benefits; who govern, control, and learn from each project and program. Each has an agent as a companion that drafts what the practice owes.

• PMO or portfolio governance leader

  Establishes the rules, prepares decisions, tracks obligations, and coordinates the forums. The register is this role's instrument, and the first conversation is usually here.

• CFO, CIO, or investment committee sponsor

  Wants investment oversight, escalation, and accountability that hold between sittings, not only at them.

• Committee chair and investment control staff

  Receive complete decision packages before the deadline and exercise recorded authority when they decide.

• Security, architecture, and risk teams

  Validate the deployment boundary, the permissions each agent holds, and the evidence the system leaves behind.

• Every stakeholder of every endeavor

  Sponsors, customers, suppliers, and team members of each project, program, and portfolio receive the papers, the alerts, and the decisions in the tools they already use, and can see who decided and under which rule.

What we measure

The unit of measurement is the disturbance episode: a cost overrun, a supplier failure, an engineering re-estimate, a directive from above. For each one, the question is whether the portfolio absorbed it or amplified it. The six readings below are the ones the research behind Tacitum uses to answer that question, and the product is designed to record them as each episode happens rather than reconstruct them afterward.

1. Within the window

   Whether the authorized decision arrived by the time the disturbance allowed, not merely by the next sitting. That time is set by the disturbance and the work, not by the calendar. Missed windows are counted.

2. Through the rules

   The share of episodes resolved by a pre-authorized path: absorbed within a bound, escalated per rule, or sent down the standing off-cycle path. The rest were improvised.

3. Thresholds that fire

   For each episode, whether the written threshold fired, fired late, stayed silent, or never existed. A threshold that never fires is governance on paper.

4. Baselines by approval

   Episodes that close with an approved change to scope, schedule, or cost, against those that close with an unapproved departure from one.

5. Responses that hold

   Whether a decision stands or is reversed within a short interval, and whether a breach that keeps recurring leads to a rule change or to the same handling by hand.

6. The cost of governing

   Staff time to prepare decisions and to maintain the register, and the share of committee items that arrive with their evidence before they are due.

Read together, these say whether a portfolio absorbs disturbance or amplifies it. Repeated reversals are thrash; nothing ever coming due is drift. The pattern we are after is governed flexibility: course changed quickly, through the organization's own rules, and the change holds.

Who is behind it

• John SchlichterCo-founder

  Agents can only keep rules that someone defined. John led the international team of about 800 practitioners in 35 countries that wrote the global standard for organizational project management and PPM, published by ISO and adopted worldwide. His doctoral research at Trinity College Dublin examined how portfolio management becomes a dynamic capability that adapts as conditions change. For over two decades he has worked in the portfolios of global organizations, spanning Fortune 100 companies and equally esteemed government entities. John conceived Tacitum and writes its code.

• Maura ClarkCo-founder

  Running agents inside a customer’s own data center, and proving afterward what each agent did, are infrastructure problems. An executive who knows her way around complex technology organizations, Maura has spent 15 years in telecom and data center networking, most recently helping enterprises, cloud providers, and critical infrastructure operators connect AI workloads. She authored UOR-ADDR, an open standard for addressing and verifying AI agent content adopted by the UOR Foundation, and contributed to its Rust reference implementation. She holds certifications in AI infrastructure from NVIDIA and IBM.

• Scott DardenCo-founder

  Timing failures cost most where organizations must act in step across borders. For over two decades, Scott has led supply chain and logistics programs across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, including defense procurement, enterprise logistics, and client program direction at Maersk, U.S. Department of State, and U.S. Department of Defense, among others. Over the years, he has founded several startups in Dubai. He knows what it takes to make explicit and tacit rules work when the work among contractors, suppliers, and customers crosses continents and cultures. He is fluent in both English and Arabic. يتحدث اللغتين الإنجليزية والعربية بطلاقة.

Strategic Advisor

• Benn Konsynski

  Benn Konsynski is the George S. Craft Professor of Information Systems and Operations Management at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, and he previously held faculty appointments at Harvard Business School and the University of Arizona. His research centers on decision support systems and on information systems that coordinate work across organizational boundaries, two foundations of Tacitum’s governed agents for portfolio decisions. He has served on the boards of several technology companies, and he holds a PhD in computer science from Purdue University.