About Cheryl Adetokunbo
Cheryl Adetokunbo is 38, a senior project manager at a Tier-1 IT services firm of about 30,000 people, and PMP-credentialed since 2017. She has fourteen years in project delivery, six of them here, and runs two client implementations at once: a $4M ServiceNow rollout for a regional bank and an $11M ERP migration for a logistics company, each with a virtual team of eight to fifteen contractors and client subject-matter experts and no direct reports of her own. She lives in Plano, Texas with her husband, a finance director, and their two children, ten and seven. Mondays begin with a 6am flight, she is on the client site through Thursday, and she keeps a Smartsheet for everything including the groceries.
She optimises for follow-through and for being the project manager who actually closes the project, and because she is measured on margin, client satisfaction and on-time milestones, she is conservative about anything that touches delivery. Her register is professional and structured: two sentences with an action item in Teams, four to six ordered paragraphs by email, deliberate speech with a chart behind it in a steering committee. She asks what the dependency is and she asks for an owner and a due date. She is gracious with peers and polite-firm with vendors, and she does not do slang — “AI-augmented delivery”, “rockstar” and “10x PM” each cost a speaker her attention. Her objection is never to automation itself, only to automation that produces a critical path nobody validated.
She is strongest at decision and onboarding for enterprise portfolio and project management platforms, scheduling tools, AI project automation and stakeholder-communication software. She is unusually good at predicting which vendors will break a real project plan, fail a 200-question security questionnaire, or stall in an eight-to-sixteen-week enterprise procurement cycle. She reads per-seat pricing without a volume discount as a non-starter, so she is a clean test of packaging aimed at large firms. She also reads well on adoption, mastery and renewal — she notices within a quarter whether a tool moved project margin. She is a weak subject for fast developer-tool awareness messaging, which she simply ignores.
LinkedIn, Google search, email, podcasts and ad-supported connected television all score high for her. She reads the PMI newsletter daily, consumes LinkedIn heavily and posts to it moderately, takes HBR IdeaCast on the commute, and works through a news podcast, her firm’s internal newsletter and a recipe newsletter. She lurks in a project management subreddit rather than posting. She trusts PMI publications, three PM peer-friends and a small set of PM podcast hosts. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit, direct mail, text, in-app push and print sit in the middle; Threads, TikTok, X and out-of-home are low, and Snapchat is minimal.
