Top Project Management Trends

As we come to the end of a big year in project management, it seemed appropriate to look back and revisit some of the major trends we’ve been reporting on and revisit them as they’re sure to have an impact on the year ahead.

Project management is having a moment. It’s become a descriptive for not only the certified professionals, but increasingly being used to define anyone tasked with managing anything from planning to completion, regardless of size, scale and scope.  Over the course of the past year we’ve seen more chatter on what is termed the “accidental project manager,” though that doesn’t mean we’ve been silent on the more technical workings of project management. We’ve published countless articles on a range of topics for the project leader and the project manager, from stakeholder management to time-tracking tips to trends in PMOs. See what have been our biggest trends throughout the year.

project management trends 2015

Stakeholder Management

Contributor Mike Clayton addressed stakeholders in a two-part posting on our site. In the first installment he wrote about how it’s better to engage than manage your stakeholders. Leading a project is all about managing the resources, but your stakeholders, as Clayton wisely notes, demand a different type of relationship, especially if you hope to have a productive project.

By engaging with your stakeholders, Clayton writes, you’re going to earn their respect and facilitate the processes you though could be controlled solely through managerial skills. Of course, first you must identify the stakeholders , then you have to in a sense analyze them in order to know how best to engage with them.

For part two, Clayton goes into greater detail about how to plan a campaign for engaging with your stakeholders. Here he delves into the importance of message and tone, each of which must be specifically tailored to the individual stakeholder. This includes figuring out what medium is best when communicating with your stakeholder, what approach can motivate the changes in the project you want from your stakeholder and creating a mechanism for feedback.

Timesheets

Elizabeth Harrin, who owns and operates the blog A Girl’s Guide to Project Management, spend the year explaining the importance of timesheets. She wrote about how timesheets can curb the bleeding lose of billable revenue if we focus on making them more accurate. She explored why timesheets are often inaccurate and how to get the right data.

Timesheets may not be sexy, but Harrin loves them, as she explicitly stated in another article. First she debunks the commonly held myths about timesheet, such as it being authoritarian, micromanaging and a waste of time, among other things, and then shows how in fact it supports enterprise, foster return on investment and supports your team.

Timesheets can also help you get better estimates. The resurgence in timesheets is hand in glove with the current craze for data. Timesheets provide great data and that data can assist in giving you better results when estimating. Past projects can provide facts which then can be applied to future endeavors. You can assess performance and better understand how your team works. Tracking hours is also helpful, if you’re going to bill for them.

You should go back and read all of Harrin’s insightful writings on timesheets, and if you’re convinced on how helpful they can be then read ProjectManger.com CEO Jason Westland’s article on How to Get Your Team to Start Using Timesheets. It further explains why timesheets matter and shows how easy it can be to use them as well as train and support for them.

Leadership

If ever there’s been a topic that has been beaten to death, it’s leadership. But we took a few swings at the subject and thanks to contributor and project leadership coach, trainer and consultant Susanne Madsen, we managed to breath new life into the subject.

Through a series of short tutorial videos, Madsen showed how to build trust with your team on the four pillars of competence, connection, communication and honesty. She furthered that discussion in the video on influencing different people on your team, by separating them into four groups — driver, expressive, amiable and analytical — and offering practical advice for dealing with each.

A leader has to deal not only with resources but stakeholders, and Madsen provide a pragmatic approach for dealing with difficult stakeholders. And she knows that a true leader doesn’t do it all by themselves. Being able to delegate is crucial to getting a project done on schedule. Madsen knows how to delegate elegantly and shares her approach, as well as noting what to and what not to delegate.

PMO

Another contributor, Lindsay Scott, a former project office manager for Hewlett Packard, who remains active in the field with her monthly meet up group PMO Flashmob and the PMO Conference, wrote an educating post on the evolution of PMO tools and offered her thoughts on future trends.

Beyond an informative history lesson, Scott provide more practical advice on how to set up a PMO. She discussed what the four different types of PMO are as well as how most organizations set up a PMO. Once a PMO has increased its activity, Scott wrote about the Center of Excellence model of PMO, which creates and maintains the standards of project management within the business, and then how to advance the PMO.

There’s a hidden role of the PMO in that it fosters collaboration, which Scott also addressed in a post. A PMO can help team collaboration through the creation of a project room, daily standup meetings and a visual overview of the project’s progress. On remote teams, Scott said the se of a virtual water cooler conversation and virtual project wall are both good ways to build bonds over distances.

Nuts and Bolts

When it comes to the nitty-gritty of project management, our resident expert and video host, Jennifer Bridges, PMP, took us into the weeds and then held our hands to help us find our way out. She produced tutorials on everything from an introduction to project planning to advanced project planning. She spoke to some of the topics above, such as showing how to make timesheets fun for your team and when to push back with stakeholders.

Project managers, embrace your social side

Social collaboration (known also as enterprise social or enterprise social collaboration) has been silently transforming the way employees interact and work across organisations. For those organisations who’ve delivered on a considered social collaboration strategy, they’ve benefited from reshaping the way work gets done, by embedding social collaboration into the day- to-day work flow, they’ve fundamentally transformed conventional business processes, enabling a more productive and more enjoyable working environment. One that brings out the brilliance of their workforce. It’s no wonder there has been a surge in the uptake of social collaboration over the last five years.

What is social collaboration? 

It is a fresh way of working, one that harnesses the power of human networks as a means to get employees working together better. It delivers the ideals of personal social networks (connecting and interacting with others, information sharing, and discovery) and extends this with group-centric features, empowering people to work together to achieve common goals.

Why has social collaboration finally happened? 

Unsurprisingly there have been technological advances in the social collaboration platforms, but these haven’t been significant success factors. Surprisingly it’s the people that have permitted social collaboration to succeed. Employees, accustomed to using social networking in their personal lives, have become more accommodating in adopting social and collaborative approaches in their working lives. This relaxed employee attitude has finally permitted organisations to adopt innovative social collaboration approaches. Additionally, with the realization by senior management, that top-down directives don’t work for social implementations, better outcomes are achieved when these are compelled by their employees.

How is this relevant to programme and project managers? 

In a nutshell, adopting social collaboration in a programme or project environment results in more effective collaboration between the team members (and stakeholders/partners if you extend it out to them), knowledge sharing (especially with virtual teams) and speedier communication channels, altogether leading to more successful project teams.

Imagine if you were given an environment that enabled your team members to get projects completed efficiently and promptly, assisting them to rapidly find the information they need, when they need it; straightforwardly sharing knowledge, experience and skills; communicating spontaneously, and seamlessly work together across geographies to achieve common business objectives of the project. Now extend this out to those difficult stakeholders you need to handle warily on a day to day basis; If they could participate in a collaborative manner would they be easier to deal with? Could you leverage this approachable engagement to overcome challenges and speed up project delivery?

What does this mean to the programme and project manager role? 

It’s changing the way we work. Many in project management are still shying away from taking the plunge because social collaboration may seem overwhelming. But with the right strategies, tools and engagement, social collaboration can be a remarkable way to improve outcomes for your programmes and projects.

In a project environment, social collaboration has proven to improve communications, work management, knowledge management, cross-project interchange and innovation.

Project communication - Effective communication is a critical differentiator on whether a project is a success or not, in an environment where 50% or more of a project manager’s time is consumed by communication. Communication challenge only increases as the complexity increases in a programme environment. Social collaboration extends traditional communication channels (that are often direct and restricted, such as email) to encourage more inclusive engagement and collaboration, across organisational and geographical boundaries. It also enables virtual relationship building and discovery of people who can add contextual value to your project. 

Personal work management – Enabling the project team to do the right thing, at the right time, with access to the right resources or rapidly discover people that can assist. 

Skill and knowledge management – Encourages sharing, capturing knowledge, experience and skills, often on an open informal basis. It enables ramping up of skills, speeding up on-boarding of team members, and lessons learned for project initiation. Even providing local expertise to over-all knowledge capture. Locating individuals with expertise, social collaboration provides an ideal way for a project manager to find new and untapped talent within the organisation. 

Cross-project interchange – Enabling an exchange of ideas, problem solving and insight across interrelated projects and programmes. Improves relationships with management and teams delivering these initiatives. This may also extend outside the organisational boundaries to partners. 

Innovation – The ability to combine, capture and develop numerous perspectives has proven to facilitate problem solving, idea development, and innovation. Finding people with others with shared interests to help them solve large problems. Organisations have nurtured this insight through communities of practice, wikis, micro-blogs, etc. means that knowledge is retained and can evolve over time, benefitting future projects.

For many programme and project manager that have been tasked to deliver these social change projects, they have begrudgingly entered unfamiliar territory. One where collaboration is a key outcome of the project, as well as a prerequisite enabling it.

Experience has taught me that it is best to adopt an “eating one’s own dog food” approach to delivering these social collaboration endeavors. One where the project team utilities the social collaboration platform and adopts collaborative behaviors. Whilst this technique helps develop and test the social collaboration “product”, it also enables lessons to be learnt in a “safe” environment and empowers the team to explore more innovative outcomes.

Top Project Management Trends

As we come to the end of a big year in project management, it seemed appropriate to look back and revisit some of the major trends we’ve been reporting on and revisit them as they’re sure to have an impact on the year ahead.

Project management is having a moment. It’s become a descriptive for not only the certified professionals, but increasingly being used to define anyone tasked with managing anything from planning to completion, regardless of size, scale and scope.  Over the course of the past year we’ve seen more chatter on what is termed the “accidental project manager,” though that doesn’t mean we’ve been silent on the more technical workings of project management. We’ve published countless articles on a range of topics for the project leader and the project manager, from stakeholder management to time-tracking tips to trends in PMOs. See what have been our biggest trends throughout the year. 

project management trends 2016

Stakeholder Management

Contributor Mike Clayton addressed stakeholders in a two-part posting on our site. In the first installment he wrote about how it’s better to engage than manage your stakeholders. Leading a project is all about managing the resources, but your stakeholders, as Clayton wisely notes, demand a different type of relationship, especially if you hope to have a productive project.

By engaging with your stakeholders, Clayton writes, you’re going to earn their respect and facilitate the processes you though could be controlled solely through managerial skills. Of course, first you must identify the stakeholders , then you have to in a sense analyze them in order to know how best to engage with them.

For part two, Clayton goes into greater detail about how to plan a campaign for engaging with your stakeholders. Here he delves into the importance of message and tone, each of which must be specifically tailored to the individual stakeholder. This includes figuring out what medium is best when communicating with your stakeholder, what approach can motivate the changes in the project you want from your stakeholder and creating a mechanism for feedback.

Timesheets

Elizabeth Harrin, who owns and operates the blog A Girl’s Guide to Project Management, spend the year explaining the importance of time sheets. She wrote about how timesheets can curb the bleeding lose of billable revenue if we focus on making them more accurate. She explored why timesheets are often inaccurate and how to get the right data.

Time sheets may not be sexy, but Harrin loves them, as she explicitly stated in another article. First she debunks the commonly held myths about timesheet, such as it being authoritarian, micromanaging and a waste of time, among other things, and then shows how in fact it supports enterprise, foster return on investment and supports your team.

Time sheets can also help you get better estimates. The resurgence in time sheets is hand in glove with the current craze for data. Timesheets provide great data and that data can assist in giving you better results when estimating. Past projects can provide facts which then can be applied to future endeavors. You can assess performance and better understand how your team works. Tracking hours is also helpful, if you’re going to bill for them.

You should go back and read all of Harrin’s insightful writings on timesheets, and if you’re convinced on how helpful they can be then read Projectionist CEO Jason West land's article on How to Get Your Team to Start Using Time sheets. It further explains why time sheets matter and shows how easy it can be to use them as well as train and support for them.

Leadership

If ever there’s been a topic that has been beaten to death, it’s leadership. But we took a few swings at the subject and thanks to contributor and project leadership coach, trainer and consultant Susanne Madsen, we managed to breath new life into the subject.

Through a series of short tutorial videos, Madsen showed how to build trust with your team on the four pillars of competence, connection, communication and honesty. She furthered that discussion in the video on influencing different people on your team, by separating them into four groups — driver, expressive, amiable and analytical — and offering practical advice for dealing with each.

A leader has to deal not only with resources but stakeholders, and Madsen provide a pragmatic approach for dealing with difficult stakeholders. And she knows that a true leader doesn’t do it all by themselves. Being able to delegate is crucial to getting a project done on schedule. Madsen knows how to delegate elegantly and shares her approach, as well as noting what to and what not to delegate.

PMO

Another contributor, Lindsay Scott, a former project office manager for Hewlett Packard, who remains active in the field with her monthly meet up group PMO Flashmob and the PMO Conference, wrote an educating post on the evolution of PMO tools and offered her thoughts on future trends.

Beyond an informative history lesson, Scott provide more practical advice on how to set up a PMO. She discussed what the four different types of PMO are as well as how most organizations set up a PMO. Once a PMO has increased its activity, Scott wrote about the Center of Excellence model of PMO, which creates and maintains the standards of project management within the business, and then how to advance the PMO.

There’s a hidden role of the PMO in that it fosters collaboration, which Scott also addressed in a post. A PMO can help team collaboration through the creation of a project room, daily standup meetings and a visual overview of the project’s progress. On remote teams, Scott said the se of a virtual water cooler conversation and virtual project wall are both good ways to build bonds over distances.

Nuts and Bolts

When it comes to the nitty-gritty of project management, our resident expert and video host, Jennifer Bridges, PMP, took us into the weeds and then held our hands to help us find our way out. She produced tutorials on everything from an introduction to project planning to advanced project planning. She spoke to some of the topics above, such as showing how to make timesheets fun for your team and when to push back with stakeholders.

Outsourcing

To be fair, organizations desperately need new models of PMOs. Despite of research, frameworks and tools, most PMOs fail to achieve their mission and to deliver benefits, which explains a third trend we observe currently: outsourced PMOs and project management services.

Although it would be nice to have a good in-house PMO and to build internal project management capabilities, some organizations find it too cumbersome and time consuming. Besides, there is a perception that consulting companies specialized in project management are more capable to provide those services with excellence and at a reasonable price.

Project management services might include the planning, execution and control of a single project or a set of projects. It is a growing business for consulting companies and project management IT providers (platform, templates, methodology etc). As a matter of fact, outsourced project management is propelling PMO As a Service. And we expect to observe new players on that field.

Decentralization of Project Management

Considering that Project Management is an interdisciplinary approach to tackle temporary endeavors, at operational levels PMOs should provide consistent guidance to initiate a project properly, to plan the project with enough detail, to support the project’s execution, to monitor and control the project through its life cycle, and to close the project formally.

There are plenty of standards, methodologies and best practices created by private companies, governmental institutions, professional organizations, and more. The Project Management Institute is one of the leading organizations in promoting project management practice with the PMBOK Guide. The International Project Management Association holds the Competence Baseline and the Axelos Global Best Practice now sponsors PRINCE2 and MSP standards, to name a few.

By definition, a Project Management Office is an organizational structure and it should operate according to a business model aligned to corporate goals and strategy. New types of PMOs surge to face current organizational challenges. As pressures for more agility mounts, traditional PMOs stumble to keep pace with innovative approaches and hybrid methodologies. On top of that, cloud-based project management platforms made easier for organizations to adopt more than one solution. 

Decentralization is a trend in which PMO’s functions are distributed, and sometimes duplicated, among different business areas to suit their particular needs. For example, a large aerospace company structured an Engineering Division around project management communities of practice while the IT Department possess a PMO to manage outsourced projects.

When it comes to PMOs, there is no “one size fits all.” 

The key take-away here is that organizations are preferring to have virtual PMOs, decentralized PMO’s functions and even temporary PMOs instead of traditional corporate PMOs. As project management professionals and practitioners mature, it is expected that they take over some of the PMO functions.

The Fall of the Traditional PMOs

Although there is solid research supporting the need for PMOs, emphasizing their benefits in linking organizational strategy and project execution, most of real-world PMOs fail miserably in delivering value. That’s because these PMOs are created out of the blue without proper change management, usually based on half-backed recipes and standardized tools. In the absence of a common understanding on the PMO’s mission by senior management, organizations end up with a Frankenstein’s monster of processes and functions without tangible results.

By far, the biggest and most common mistake we observe when organizations try to implement a PMO is lack of project management knowledge, experience and maturity. Senior executives see PMOs as black-boxes to successfully (and magically) deliver project results. Lack of bottom line improvement and low increase in project success rates frustrate senior executives’ expectations. They don’t understand the role played by organizational structure and its impact on project management.

Failed PMO implementations frequently rely solely on project management processes and tools without paying attention to organizational fit. Connecting the dots between organizational strategy and project execution demands strong alignment and proper support.

In general, most organizations are upset by low PMO performance. Senior executives feel either burned by poor PMO implementations or trapped by black-box PMOs without clear indication of value added. Poor past experience with PMOs undermined credibility. Before implementing a PMO, answer these Frequently Avoided Questions.

Project practitioners have now the difficult task of reinventing PMOs and re-connecting them to the organizational strategy as PMOs have a trip back to prove their value in the eyes of skeptic business managers.

The key take-away here is that PMOs are now under serious scrutiny of executives and we expect to continue witnessing a decrease in PMOs, which leads us to a new trend in decentralizing and outsourcing project management.

Getting to the delivery stage for a large-scale project requires a great deal of up-front work.

By the time it gets to the point where a delivery team comes into play, a company could have spent one million dollars over the course of a year. Whether it is a consulting company or an internal organization, the effects of what the delivery organization produces will determine if the project was successful. This could be a highly technical software project or a business process development project. If you do not deliver what was agreed to in the timeframe expected, the chances for additional business is remote. That is why the delivery organization has to be in sync with the sales group or internal organization requesting the work on the front end and the support team on the back end. If the support team has difficulty maintaining the product, costs will increase, personnel will get frustrated and leave, and the client will be quite upset. 

So what does the profile look like for a delivery director? Look for it in my next blog entry.