The dawn of a new year is the time to make plans for the future. Businesses draw up strategies for future goals, governments plan for new initiatives and individuals make up their personal and professional agendas. Despite our best efforts and most well thought out plans, the future is always one up on us with its own plans and tactics. At such times, it is not unnatural to wish for some means to “see” the future, know what it holds. I know it is impossible to do so with bulls eye accuracy, but given the contemplation and design that our plans involve, one can at least attempt a calculated guesstimate. Take the discipline of Project Management itself; as practicing professionals, what do we think is the future of this line of work? Here are my thoughts.

Contrary to the science of Project Management which is still in its infancy, projects have been around for quite some time. Projects have been planned and executed by man even before recorded history. Of course, the scale and complexity of these has increased over time and it is safe to assume that this will continue to be the case even in the coming years. As human beings, we are constantly in competition with ourselves, challenging ourselves to do better, faster, higher or cheaper. I believe that this race will still hold ground in the near future.

In the past, the focus was in getting the best of that is available, keeping competitors and vendors on their toes by liaising with various parties and minimizing risk through continuous competitive bidding and building redundancy in the system. But increased costs of maintenance and focus on efficient utilization of bandwidth has now shifted the advantage to integrated solution providers. Businesses will no longer go shopping for different piece meal solutions. Companies are more and more looking at partners who can offer a complete suite of applications for their business needs. Given this fact, project managers and performing organizations will increasingly have to widen their service offering or seek out and forge partnerships with entities that can provide competencies that they are unable to develop close at hand.

Volatility in the global landscape and recent recessions will impose stricter criteria on project selection. The process will mainly be driven by two factors – the criticality of the investment and the sustainability of the value it is expected to provide. No more will short term endeavors that provide short term benefits be the way to go. The ends will more than ever justify the means; project managers will necessarily need to demonstrate that their projects provide value and provide value over a longer duration of time, over repeated use, over a wider base of users and over a more adverse situation than the current.

Project governance is an area that will assume pivotal significance. Single person sponsorships are on their way out and management by committees will take its place. Request for Proposals from clients now contain questions on Project Management Office experience as well as other areas of project control. In the light of increasing regulatory mandates, the “how” of project execution will be scrutinized to great detail. This translates to a metamorphosis in the basic idea of project execution; no longer will managers be able to get away saying “I got the job done”. They will now have to account for how they got it done as well as why they got it done the way that they did.

The changing times are slowly blurring the lines between the roles of a sales personnel, a project manager and a relationship manager. The future project managers will be expected to be equally conversant with sales techniques used in clinching a deal as well as in engagement management principles of customer retention. Gone are the days when a project manager was only concerned with the delivery of the project on time and within budget. Sales and marketing will soon become a part of project management and a project manager will need to graduate to the role of an engagement manager.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 at 9:52 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.