Timing is everything…
…in strategy, organization, and work, particularly temporary endeavors: the adaptive projects that deliver your strategic intent in an increasingly uncertain environment. Yet the rules that run the clocks are rarely written down. Tacitum makes them explicit, then lets AI agents run your project portfolio within them. People keep the authority to decide. Agents do the work of keeping everything in step. Tacitum transforms responsibility into resilience at machine speed.
Request early accessMost portfolio failures are failures of timing
A decision arrives after the window it was meant for. A program waits on a project that is waiting on a budget review. Every forum keeps its own calendar, and nobody owns how those calendars fit together. When conditions require everyone to pivot, the clocks are reset manually.
The rules that would fix this already exist in your organization. They live in habits and in the heads of experienced people, which is why they break when those people are busy or gone. As AI agents take on more of the work, the gap widens, because an agent that does not know the rules acts on its own clock.
Before an agent can be trusted with a portfolio
Three things have to be true.
- It knows the organization's actual rules: which forums decide what, on which cycle, and what triggers an escalation.
- It acts only within authority that a named person holds, on the record.
- Every change to a rule is proposed, approved by a person, and logged, so the system can be audited after the fact.
Few organizations meet the first condition, because the rules were never written down. That is where Tacitum starts.
How Tacitum works
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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.
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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.
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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.
Agents can propose. Only people ratify.
An AI system cannot grant itself authority over when decisions get made. Someone has to hold that authority, on the record, and answer for it. Tacitum is built around that requirement, and it is what makes an agentic portfolio governable.
Every agent action is provable, not merely logged. Each request, decision, ratification, and result receives a content address under UOR-ADDR, an open standard authored by our co-founder Maura Clark, so a customer can show afterward what each agent did and under whose authority.
Built to run where the data lives
Portfolio data is among the most sensitive information an organization holds: budgets, priorities, and decisions not yet announced. Many organizations will not send it to an outside model provider.
Tacitum's agents are being built on open models served on NVIDIA accelerated computing, so they can run inside a customer's own cloud or data center. The workload is inference-heavy. Every agent decision is a model call, and validating the system means hundreds of simulated runs, each requiring thousands of agent decisions, before it touches a real portfolio.
The agents reach the systems a portfolio already runs on through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard by which a system publishes what an agent may read and do. They never call those systems directly. Every request passes through the synchronizing core, which checks it against the register, and then through a gateway that holds the credentials and makes only the approved call, inside the customer's own environment.
Where Tacitum stands
- The engine is already built upon institutional standards that govern a multi-trillion-dollar economy of temporary endeavors, standards our co-founder John Schlichter originated and that have been adopted globally for decades.
- The self-assessment is live and in use with a multinational manufacturer.
- The governance core is being tested in a simulated portfolio, under an evaluation design registered in advance.
- The agent layer is in development for 2027.
- The research behind it is being prepared for peer-reviewed journals in information systems.
Who is behind it
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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.
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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.
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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. يتحدث اللغتين الإنجليزية والعربية بطلاقة.
Strategic Advisor
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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.
Test it on a real portfolio
We are looking for a small number of PMO and portfolio leaders who want to see how their portfolio keeps time. Write to [email protected] to take part.