About ManagementPro

Strategic Project Design (SPD) is a distinct discipline that comes before planning. It defines an initiative's intended change, outcomes, measures, and assumptions, and it tests the logic connecting effort to results.

SPD builds an executable design using the LogFrame, which expresses an initiative as a cause-and-effect hypothesis. With it, leaders can see whether the activities will produce the deliverables, whether the deliverables will produce the intended purpose, and whether that purpose serves the larger goal. Misalignment, weak assumptions, poor measures, and broken connections become visible early.

Strategic Project Design does not replace traditional project management, it precedes it. It gives Agile, Waterfall, and hybrid methods a more reliable design to work from.

Why It Works

It begins before direction hardens. Most methods start once the goal is set and a plan is due. Strategic Project Design starts earlier, while the initiative can still be reshaped at low cost.

It makes the logic testable. Each level of the LogFrame is an if-then claim. Writing those claims down lets teams challenge them directly instead of debating impressions.

It connects what other approaches treat separately. Strategy, causal logic, assumptions, measures, and execution readiness live in one architecture, so a change in one shows its effect on the others.

It makes rigor simple and actionable. The core tool fits on one page and uses plain language. Teams can apply it in a working session, not after months of training.

It provides a basis for adapting. When conditions change, the design shows which assumptions have broken and which parts of the initiative must change with them.

Enhanced with AI, led by judgment. Leaders and teams draft the design. AI then reviews the draft to challenge assumptions, find gaps, strengthen measures, and stress-test the causal logic. Every decision stays with the leaders accountable for the result.

Terry Schmidt's career has run through engineering, government, international development, business, and the classroom. Each one added a piece of what is now Strategic Project Design.

It started in engineering. As an aerospace engineering student, Terry interned on NASA programs, where he learned to think in systems, causality, and performance under real conditions. He carried that discipline into government, managing federal programs at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

There he was recruited by Practical Concepts Inc., the firm that developed the Logical Framework (LogFrame) for USAID, to field-test and extend the method. That work took him to 24 countries with USAID and the World Bank, designing complex initiatives under political, technical, and institutional uncertainty.

What he saw abroad shaped everything that followed. The problems the LogFrame was built to catch, such as unclear objectives, untested assumptions, and weak links between the work and the results it was meant to produce, were just as common in companies, government agencies, and research organizations. Over the next three decades, he adapted and modernized the method so leaders in those settings could fix these problems before committing to execution.

UCLA Extension's Technical Management Program became his development laboratory. Over more than four decades of teaching short courses there, several thousand technologists and business leaders brought real initiatives into his classroom. Their questions, constraints, and results shaped the method into its current form. UCLA Extension honored him with its Distinguished Instructor Award.

Terry has trained more than 25,000 professionals. His clients include Boeing, Microsoft, Sony, Trader Joe's, and Fernco; the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); and the Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories.

He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in aerospace engineering from the University of Washington. He leads every ManagementPro engagement himself.