Future of Project Management

The future is big

The term ‘project management’ is only a few decades old. Of course many projects were managed before this science was ‘invented’,  and nobody had identified a distinctive need for a management process, still less had they decided what that process should be.

Fact is there were more projects managed before modern ‘Project Management’ was developed than have been managed since. And even today, there are more projects being managed with no help from this science than with it. It could be said, therefore, that its influence up to now has been very small but its potential influence in the future is huge.

One researcher writes in a paper, “Of the 34 important new management approaches and techniques invented since 1960, only 15 were still in use at all by 1995. Their life from invention, through peak use to disappearance, was seldom more than ten years”.

I believe that project management will survive in the long term for two reasons.

1.    It is essentially simple and

2.    It is capable of extremely wide application

The techniques which we now call project management have all been identified and developed over the last forty years. Collectively they are now a proper science, carried out by people who know how to apply it. It is a science, in that it can link cause and effect; it can be taught and learnt.

One way to know the future is to look at trends and if zero people used PM as science in 1960, then it has increased since then and we can safely say its application will continue to increase. Here are some observations to light our path:

•    B K Mundhara, Chairman of Simplex projects, said that we will have more project managers than MBAs in this country

•    In twenty years time, due to the inevitable inertia of human systems, project management has only achieved half its possible volume of application

•    In twenty years there will be 120 project managers for every one there is now – that’s quoting Dr. Martin Barnes in 2002 at a Berlin PM conference

So what will the future look like?

Application of PM will become broader. The application of PM will not just be restricted to physical enterprises like buildings and new products – it will also cover non-physical endeavors like winning an election or a court case, like merging two businesses or bringing together two people in marriage; it could even include introducing the market economy into a former communist state of a country.

Focus of PM application will shift to understanding the whole or towards ‘super projects’, which we recognize today as a programs or part of a portfolio. Every project is carried out for a commercial organization and is a sub-set to that of achieving its corporate goals. Even in a democratic government every project is a sub-project to the project of securing re-election next time. Every project we undertake as individuals is a sub-project linked to the project of securing our own happiness – whether short, medium or long term. We will start looking at managing the super projects too. These super projects will either resemble a program or a portfolio and focus will be on Benefit and Value Management.

Changes in the Science and Tools of Project Management: Both the hard as well as soft techniques of PM are changing and developing fast and can be expected to charge the velocity of change.

The battle of hard sciences

A project is about a group of people collaborating towards a (presumably) common objective. The actual management is primarily about communication and visibility of progress/work that lies ahead for the project members. Directing the executing team presents a novelty when the project and team member competencies are developed on the project itself.

Hard Sciences have evolved from network analysis and critical path method, to advanced heuristics for resource leveling and algorithms etc. But these never quite caught the fancy of real project managers. Also these hard sciences were being pursued by people who found this sort of technical progress fascinating and believed in its illusionary potential.

We continue to produce these network diagrams, Gantt charts etc; but the focus today is on sharing this data. I believe that real PMs prefer to use simple excel sheets rather than any software tools to produce the schedules. I also contend that there is still a future for such hard sciences like scheduling analysis. Hard techniques need to be learned insofar they form the foundation for visibility for project progress (e.g. in cases where details in a plan are not understood by the real PMs. Take a 2500 cr. power project oversight and macro planning achieved with 140 line items).

On the collaboration front, we see a lot of action; it’s more like a virtual communities spontaneously coming together around a project or a group of similar projects. So we have PMs googling, going to social networking sites to find answers to their issues, relying on peers to assist in sourcing people, vendors, etc.

We see project intranets being built and then integrated to social networks for collective knowledge building around issue and risk management.  This is supported by the fact many of the PM tools are adding Content Management Systems to their application suites. Is this a step in the right direction? I don’t know but things seem to developing more in line of what Gartner predicted.

Other organizational endeavors point towards creating predictable environments by way of instilling systems and process culture (e.g. ISO, CMM). We see the continuing labor on illusionary process framework definitions, but real PMs or PgMs continue to work without these.  The way I see it, these efforts have not lead us towards sound Risk Management practices; all the same, we can discern a future for this science coming up. I still find people getting upset if project plans are completely changed mid course but such is reality.

PMOs acting as a central base continue to be a real support for PM acceleration and maturity. I predict that supporting PMs, rather than playing watchmen to the governance team, will lead the battle front by taking more responsibilities as teams become more virtual. PMO reengineering will finally become a reality as PMOs supported by effective integrated applications get real estimations, measurement and mentoring to the Project environment.

All in all, development of the discipline with continue – Program, portfolio, PMO, Change Mgmt, Dash-boarding (people particularly fancy the dancing traffic lights), management by projects, etc.  But let’s keep in mind none of this is absolutely new.

On the softer side

I feel the future is more about certifications, systems and methodologies taking a back seat in order to facilitate core customer needs through involvement and communication, first and foremost.

To this end we see a merger of skills taking place in the marketplace i.e. PM/BA/EA. We are seeing a shift from certification to competency and confidence building. This trend follows the rapidly closing gap between Project Leaders and Project Managers.

We may soon see knowledge profiling of PMs being used to determine the right fit of project profile to his or her profile. My own team created an intelligent tool for learning which gave our trainers data on weak areas of the learners benchmarked with others, but we soon found out that nobody seems to using the data and info available.

We would also like to see the so called sr. leadership team finally deciding to go back to the classroom and align themselves to the PM Way of Working.

Conclusion

So if we practitioners need to remain a part of the future, we need to ensure that the science is continuously developed and at the same time so-called best practices are tested rigorously in order be really useful to real PMs. There should be real knowledge sharing happening.