Commentary: Collaboration Leads the List of Top Project Management Trends for 2012
Collaboration is a common theme throughout many of the 2012 top 10 trends for project management, which were determined by a global panel of ESI International senior executives and subject matter experts. Those trends include:
1. Program management will gain momentum, but resources remain in short supply. Increasingly, large initiatives undertaken by corporations and government agencies are being recognized for what they are and aren’t—namely programs, not projects, which require a highly advanced set of skills supported by appropriate tools and methods to execute.
Yet many organizations struggle to find the right people and lack the management practices necessary to ensure success. In 2012 the industry will see more investment in competency models, training, methodology development, tool use and career-path training to ensure that program managers are real professionals.
2. Collaboration software solutions will become an essential business tool for project teams. The proliferation of collaborative software in the project environment (such as SharePoint) will intensify in 2012. Fueled by increasingly complex and virtual projects as well as tighter budgets, today’s environment demands a more efficient way to manage communication and workflow.
Collaboration is central to project management, and productivity is greatly enhanced by having a site that allows project artifacts to be created, shared and distributed within a repository. It also provides web-based access and critical functions such as automatic distribution and notification, version control and user authentication.
3. “Learning transfer” will become the new mantra but with little structured application. The ability to apply training back to the jobsite (learning transfer) will continue to be on the minds of project management leaders and learning and development (L&D) professionals. They want their project managers to return from training ready to immediately apply what they learned.
While L&D and business heads agree that sustained learning is a sound idea, very few organizations will invest in a formal process to make it happen. In 2012 we will see many organizations discussing the importance of learning transfer without really putting in place a structured approach to ensure that it happens.
4. Agile blends create a new hybrid approach. Having moved from “manifesto to mainstream,” Agile has confronted project teams with the difficulty of implementing the experimental and hyper-collaborative approach. To transition an organization into fully adopting certain aspects of Agile, project teams are combining traditional and Agile elements to create their own hybrids. In areas such as planning, requirements and team communication, organizations are designing custom-made methodologies that work for them.
5. Smarter project investments will require a stronger marriage between project management and business process management (BPM). In the financial services industry, and specifically in the insurance sector, there will be a continued laser-like focus on performing business processes as efficiently as possible to drive down operating costs. The philosophy of BPM is fast becoming a key factor in project selection. When new projects are proposed, their value will be judged to a large extent on the impact they will have on the organization’s business processes.
The more impact the project has on reducing internal costs, the higher it will be ranked. The smart money will be spent on driving costs out of the business. Given the high premium being placed on efficient processes, project managers will need to be intimately familiar with BPM.
6. Internal certifications in corporations and federal agencies will eclipse the project management professional (PMP) credential. With roughly 470,000 project management professional credentials having been awarded worldwide thus far, the PMP remains the most popular and ubiquitous credential on the planet. However, it is not the prominent credential everywhere.
In the U.S. government as well as Fortune 500 corporations, a hierarchy of internal credentials has overshadowed the PMP in terms of prominence. To be sure, the PMP remains important but is now just one more rung on the career ladder.
7. More project management leaders will measure effectiveness based on business results. While introducing tools, using methodologies, mapping project management practices, sending project managers to training and increasing the number of PMPs in the organization are important metrics for project management leaders to achieve, they do not speak to effectiveness from a business perspective. To judge business effectiveness, project leaders need to determine if their work has had a positive, quantifiable effect on the business in terms troubled project reduction, lower project manager attrition and faster time to market. In 2012 the practice of measuring the outputs, not the inputs, of project management will gain traction.
8. Good project managers will buck unemployment trends. Even though unemployment is at record levels in many countries, good project managers are hard to find. Recruiting continues even in tough economies, and organizations need individuals who can perform the basics flawlessly.
The hunger for project management basics, in particular risk management, will continue to surge in 2012, especially in such countries as India and China, where project manager attrition rates are disturbingly high and continual training of new staff is critical.
9. Client-centric project management will outpace the “triple constraint.” For years, time, cost and scope were the metrics upon which the success of all projects and their managers were judged. While the triple constraints remain important, they are no longer the be-all, end-all for project success. While risk and quality have also been cited as additional “constraints,” the clear trend in 2012 is the value the project delivers to the organization.
The new definition of project success is that a project can exceed its time and cost estimates so long as the client determines that it is successful by whatever criteria they use. In today’s environment, project value is determined by the recipient—or client—not the provider.
10. HR professionals will seek assessments to identify high-potential project managers. Because project management is such an important function, human resources professionals in 2012 will be tasked more intensely with identifying high-potential project managers. The challenge HR professionals will face is that there is no silver-bullet assessment for identifying great project managers.
Existing knowledge and skills assessments are of little use since they are not designed for entry-level project manager positions. Nonetheless, candidates must be measured not only on their technical abilities but also on the all-important business and interpersonal skills.
