Richard Broo

Richard Broo has spent more than four decades inside complex organizations watching projects quietly drift off course, often long before leadership realizes anything is wrong. His career work spans Fortune 500 companies, mid-market firms, and private-equity-backed businesses, where he is repeatedly brought in to resolve project related issues when internal project teams are at a loss and outcomes are on the line.

Richard has expertise in product management, project management, new product development & commercialization, and operations. He has served clients in the plastics, flexible/rigid packaging, automotive/heavy truck, consumer goods, electrical/electronic, building & construction raw materials, industrial manufacturing, and medical equipment industries. Based upon his career accomplishments, he became an expert to resolve projects experiencing budget overruns, scheduling delays, scope creep, stakeholder issues, poor team dynamics, and projects failing to deliver intended results. He has guided organizations through high-risk inflection points, including stabilizing a failing medical packaging business, leading it through a controlled bankruptcy to a successful $22.2M sale.

What has shaped Richard’s approach to project management is not theory, but pattern recognition and fact-based solutions that address the root cause of project management issues  After seeing the same failure modes occur  over several engagements, he learned that most breakdowns in project planning, execution and closure trace back to the issues of: unclear scope, untested assumptions, weak project ownership, and leadership disconnect from project objectives. Tools change. Project frameworks may change, but the underlying causes of project failure stay remarkably consistent.

As founder of True North PMP Consulting, Richard works directly inside a client’s organization rather than delivering recommendations from a distance. His firm embeds itself alongside client leadership and teams to diagnose the root cause of project failure and implement root cause corrective actions that successfully address root cause. His work focuses on restoring project clarity, rebuilding project discipline, establishing metrics/milestones to achieve successful project closure, improving employee skillsets, and helping leaders to act early, before problems become existential. Trained in Agile, Hybrid and Waterfall Project Methodologies, he has taught project management at the corporate and collegiate level, grounding both company leaders and project managers on the realities of effective project management.

As a podcast guest, Richard offers candid, experience-driven conversations about why projects fail, how leadership unintentionally fuels breakdowns, what are the key factors to ensure successful project outcomes and how to recover derailed projects back from the brink of failure before time, money, and customer credibility run out.