I’ve spent nearly a decades on the construction side of project management as an owner’s rep and 30 years in design prior to that and a combined project management window of over 15 years. I know the problems. I know what slows teams down, what gets missed on site, what PMs wish they had but can’t justify buying from a vendor. That knowledge isn’t new.
What’s New
What’s new is what I can do with it. Over the past several months, I’ve been investing seriously in learning how to work with AI — not just asking it questions, but using it as a genuine creative and technical partner. The result? Three free web tools I built for the project management community, without hiring a developer and without learning to code from scratch.
Here’s what I built, why, and what it means for anyone with domain expertise who’s curious about AI.
The Tools
WalkTrack — Field Walk Tracker
What I built: WalkTrack is a mobile-first Progressive Web App (PWA) for construction field walks. You start a walk, log observations with one-tap severity tagging (Info / Action Required / Safety), assign items to trades or individuals, capture photos, and generate a professional PDF report — all from your phone, with no app store download and no login required.
It installs directly to your home screen from a browser link. It works offline. It remembers your projects, buildings, floors, locations, and subcontractors so the dropdowns are pre-loaded when you’re on site. When the walk is done, you can save the PDF or email the report directly from the app.
This is the kind of tool that used to require a $200/month software subscription or a custom-built solution. Now it’s free at https://pm-mastery.com/walktrack
PM Formula Cheat Sheet
The problem: EVM formulas, PERT calculations, scheduling math — most PMs know they exist, fewer have them memorized, and almost no one has them in a clean, searchable reference they can pull up on their phone during a meeting or exam prep session.
What I built: 27 essential PM formulas across 8 categories — Earned Value Management, PERT/Estimation, Scheduling/CPM, Risk, Communication, Cost/Investment, Quality, and General — in a single searchable web app with inline calculators for 15 of them.
You can filter by category, search by keyword, see every variable defined in plain English, and run the calculations right in the tool without switching to a spreadsheet. Color-coded interpretation indicators tell you what the result actually means (CPI below 1.0? You’re over budget per unit of work completed). Check it out at https://pm-mastery.com/formulas
3-Point Estimate Calculator
The problem: Single-point estimates are optimism disguised as analysis. PMs know this, but doing PERT estimates properly — with standard deviation and confidence intervals — is arithmetic that slows people down when they’re trying to build a schedule.
What I built: A calculator that supports both PERT (weighted average) and Triangular methods. Enter optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic values, choose your units (days, hours, weeks, or cost), and the tool gives you the estimate, standard deviation, and 68/95/99.7% confidence intervals with a visual range bar and plain-English interpretation of what the spread actually means.
There’s also a multi-task accumulator — add tasks one at a time and it calculates your total estimate and combined range as you build the list. Because estimating rarely happens for one task in isolation. https://pm-mastery.com/3point_calculator
The Bigger Point: AI as a Force Multiplier for Domain Experts
I didn’t become a developer. I don’t write code from scratch. What I did was learn how to collaborate with AI effectively — how to articulate what I needed, how to iterate, how to catch errors, how to push for quality. The AI built the code. I brought 30+ years of knowing what the code should actually do.
That distinction matters. AI tools are often marketed as “anyone can build anything” — which oversells it. What I’d say instead is: if you have genuine domain expertise and real-world experience, AI dramatically expands the ceiling of what you can create.
I knew what a field walk report should contain because I’ve generated hundreds of them. I knew what PERT calculation outputs a PM actually needs because I’ve taught the formula. I knew that a 3-point estimator is useless without a confidence interval because I’ve watched teams underestimate catastrophically. The AI didn’t know any of that. I did. The combination is what made these tools possible.
What’s Next
This is the beginning, not the destination. My AI skills are still growing, and so is the list of tools I want to build. I’m planning more utilities for the PM-Mastery suite — some for construction-specific workflows, some for general PM practice, all free and built with the same principles: mobile-first, no login, no subscription, actually useful on the job.
If you use these tools, I’d love to hear what’s working and what’s missing. And if you’re a project manager with a workflow problem you’ve never found a good solution for — tell me about it. That’s exactly the kind of input that turns into the next tool. The community builds this together.
Try the tools at https://pm-mastery.com/pm_tools
Questions or feedback? Email me at Walt@pm-mastery.com
Walt
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