By Felix C. Veroya
Last week, I have been in five speaking engagements across the topics of Project Management, Sustainability, Lean Six Sigma, and Personal Strengths for Accelerated Success to various organizations and universities. While doing the Project Management material covering the latest trends in the practice, I thought to share my learnings here in my column, too.
Project Management is one of the most essential skills of the 21st century. Based on research, only about 25% of the companies across the globe practice formal project management processes. In 2018, according to PMI, 9.9% of every dollar invested was wasted due to poor project performance – that’s $99 million for every $1 billion invested.
Now, I want to share the seven (7) emerging trends in Project Management that could help organizations to maximize their resources in reference to the practice.
#1: Resource planning is becoming more and more important. The three levels of enterprise-wide resource management (strategic, tactical, operational) and the responsibilities of the roles involved becomes more critical than ever. Good resource management will only work together – in the interaction between the project manager, team leader, team member, and PMO (Project Management Office). Lay the foundations with processes and tools.
#2: Knowledge sharing continues to rise. Organizations are breaking the “guru” mindset wherein only a few individuals know tools and techniques and are shifting to knowledge sharing to create a continuous flow in its processes and projects. The closer the skills of the available staff members are to each other, the easier it will be to assign them to various project roles. Organizations must ensure that the knowledge of key experts is distributed among several heads.
#3: Agile and hybrid methods continue to gain importance. In traditional planning, switching between projects is more difficult than synchronized agile planning. Look into agile methods and consider what you might be able to adopt at your company – e.g., the synchronized planning of teams. The open-ended approach can provide greater benefits in projects suitable for this purpose. Hybrid systems are often the appropriate solution. Inform yourself to find out which of your projects are appropriate for hybrid approaches and what this combination could look like in your case.
#4: Remote working and hybrid work environments are here to stay. Employees will continue to demand the best of both worlds of working in the office and from home based on The Work Trend Index by Microsoft. When working from home, hold more but shorter regular meetings for substantive topics. Personal calls will help you feel how the team is doing. Switched-off cameras will only cause greater distance in a virtual meeting. Turn on the camera and encourage your colleagues to do the same for a more human approach to the new situation.
#5: Change management is becoming more important. To make projects successful, it is indispensable to duly address the change process in the organization in parallel to the actual content implementation. However, it probably always makes sense in such ventures to get change management specialists on board. In change projects, ensure from the beginning that the people affected by the changes are properly prepared and assisted.
#6: The PMO is becoming more strategic. In this context, successful strategic capacity planning requires an enterprise-wide resource overview and good skills management. Ensure from the top down that failed projects can be recognized as such and aborted. This requires a cultural change throughout the company that takes away the project managers’ fear of failure.
#7: Using PM tools is becoming easier. Get acquainted with appropriate cloud-based tools for your project management.
Let’s continue to be #significantlybetter project managers, together!
Do you want to talk? Get in touch with me thru fcveroya@asklexph.com.