Europe is taking important steps towards greater digital sovereignty. As public institutions increasingly explore alternatives to proprietary software, open source solutions offer opportunities to strengthen transparency, interoperability, and control over critical digital infrastructure.
We are excited that the European Commission has chosen OpenProject for a pilot project to explore a sovereign, open source alternative to proprietary project management solutions. On October 15, 2026, our team presented at the European Commission’s PMO Network in Brussels. Under the title “PM² in Practice: From PM² methodology to everyday practice – with OpenProject and sovereign AI”, Felicia Mundhenke, Head of Strategic Client Relations & Partnerships, and Dominic Bräunlein, Head of AI, shared our approach to practical PM² workflows and responsible AI in OpenProject.
The discussion focused on bringing the European Commission’s project management methodology into daily work and exploring how sovereign AI could make project management more effective without sacrificing control.
The OpenProject team at the European Commission in Brussels.
PM²: A common European foundation for project management
The PM² methodology was developed by the European Commission to provide a practical, openly accessible framework for managing projects. It defines governance, roles, artefacts, and a lifecycle with four phases: Initiating, Planning, Executing, and Closing. Decisions and approvals are supported by defined phase gates.
By offering a common language for project management, PM² supports cooperation across organizations and borders. But adopting a methodology does not automatically make it part of everyday work. Teams also need tools that translate its principles into consistent processes.
From methodology to everyday practice with OpenProject
At OpenProject, we are working with public-sector customers to make PM² operational through structured, collaborative workflows.
One important shift is from document-centric project management to connected project data. A milestone in a Word document is simply text. In OpenProject, a milestone can be represented as structured information with a date, responsibility, status, links to relevant risks or budgets, and a change history.
Documents remain important, but they can increasingly become outputs generated from project data, rather than separate places where project information must be maintained.
For example, project information can be maintained centrally in OpenProject, used to generate a PM² Project Charter or other artefact, and stored in a connected document platform such as Nextcloud. This combines structured project management with controlled, shareable documentation in a sovereign open source environment.
Project initiation, approval workflows, and artefacts
Together with public-sector organizations, we are developing support for the PM² lifecycle, including structured initiation requests, artefact templates and workflows, and document generation.
A Project Initiation Request illustrates the approach: a request is submitted through a structured form, reviewed through a documented approval workflow, and can lead to a new project based on a PM² template. Relevant documents can then be generated and filed in Nextcloud.
Likewise, a Project Charter can draw on project information such as budgets, milestones, risks, and deliverables, rather than requiring teams to manually consolidate the same information in multiple documents.
The goal is to simplify administrative work while supporting consistency, traceability, and informed decisions across the project lifecycle.
From PM² to PMflex: Connecting European and German approaches
PMflex, the German federal government’s project management framework, builds on the European Commission’s PM² methodology. It extends and adapts the common foundation for the needs of Germany’s federal administration while retaining PM² as its methodological core.
That connection matters: institutions can work from a shared European approach while addressing their national and organizational requirements. Our focus is therefore to build PM² functionality as the foundation, with PMflex support as an extension rather than a separate methodology.
We have gained practical experience through our work with the German public sector, including transitions to openDesk and OpenProject and the introduction of PM² and PMflex-based processes.
The experience has also provided important lessons for adoption: migration tooling, reusable templates, training, accessible day-to-day support, and management backing all matter. A project management platform should guide people through a methodology, not assume that every user is already an expert.
What’s next for PM² and PMflex in OpenProject?
Our presentation in Brussels also looked ahead to the functionality we are developing with public-sector customers to make PM² processes easier to use and manage.
Key development topics include:
- PM² artefact generation: Generate standardized documents from structured project information.
- Status reporting: Compile PM² reports from live project data, reducing manual collection and duplication.
- Structured business cases: Support consistent project evaluation, scoring, and portfolio decisions.
- Practical methodological guidance: Connect PM² guidance, tools, templates, and training in everyday work.
- Cross-project reporting: Improve transparency across projects, programmes, and portfolios through customizable dashboards.
These topics span available functionality, work in progress, and future roadmap items. Timing and scope of planned features may change.
More than a methodology: Connecting the wider project ecosystem
In larger organizations, project management does not exist in isolation. PM²-based processes must connect to requirements, issue tracking, agile and SAFe work, testing, service management, and portfolio planning.
OpenProject’s broader roadmap supports this direction. Resource and capacity management was introduced in OpenProject 17.7. Further planned developments include workflow automation, semantic search, global reporting, and new board capabilities.
Our aim is to support PM² and PMflex within a flexible, integrated project management platform rather than confining the methodology to a standalone tool.
Sovereign AI: Smarter workflows without giving up control
In the second part of the presentation, Dominic Bräunlein, Head of AI at OpenProject, discussed how AI could support PM² workflows while preserving transparency, accountability, and digital sovereignty.
AI can help teams transform unstructured information into useful project data, prepare reports, and find relevant information more efficiently. But particularly in public administration, these benefits must not come at the expense of control over sensitive data or responsibility for decisions.
Our approach rests on three principles:
- Your infrastructure, your AI. Organizations should be able to run AI on infrastructure and inference services they control, choosing models suited to their requirements.
- Humans remain responsible. AI can prepare information and suggest actions, but people make decisions and retain oversight.
- Adaptable to your organization. AI-powered actions and skills should be configurable to match different workflows and governance requirements.
Practical AI applications for PM²
The Brussels presentation explored concrete use cases for project management offices:
- Text assistance: Turning an email into a structured change request.
- AI assistants with skills: Preparing a PM² status report from live project information.
- Semantic search: Finding relevant work based on meaning rather than exact search terms.
Looking ahead to 2027, planned areas include duplicate detection, automatic discovery of related work packages, and assistants that can trigger configurable skills within OpenProject and automated workflows.
These are opportunities to reduce repetitive administrative tasks and make project information more accessible, while keeping control over infrastructure, data, and decisions.
Building a sovereign future for European project collaboration
Our visit to the European Commission, alongside its pilot project with OpenProject, was a valuable opportunity to exchange ideas about the future of project management in Europe.
With PM², the European Commission provides an open foundation for project management. With PMflex, Germany shows how that foundation can be adapted to national needs. And with open source platforms such as OpenProject, these methodologies can be supported by software that allows organizations to retain control of their infrastructure and data.
We are proud to be part of this initiative and look forward to exploring how OpenProject can contribute to sovereign, open source project management and collaboration across Europe.
A big thank you to the team at the European Commission for the exchange and to Felicia Mundhenke, Dominic Bräunlein, Gina Plat, and our CEO Niels Lindenthal for representing OpenProject in Brussels.
Together, we can strengthen European project collaboration through open methodologies, open source technology, and digital sovereignty.
Learn more about PM² and PMflex project management with OpenProject.
