Future Development of Project Management
Project management has turned out to be an essential business discipline for years. With a fast-paced environmental, societal, technological, and economic variations on the horizon, it is critical to consider how such variations will influence how organizations execute and manage projects. More significantly, enterprising professionals ought to consider what should be done proactively for the future success of the business. Future project managers would need to be multi-skilled and multi-faceted. The new professional reality requires a combination of technical and leadership skills, project management skills, as well as strategic organization management skills along with practical ability to absorb and keep pace with new technology. The future project management would need to consider project management methodologies such as Agile and Kanban, application of artificial intelligence, tools/software to facilitate virtual project teams, and competencies of a future project manager.
While there is precise knowledge of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology would influence project management, virtually it is inevitable that AI technology will possibly automate numerous managerial project management operations. For instance, according to Bierwolf et al. (2017, June), it is expected that the risk registers and first draft programme schedules will be created using hard data by IA. Furthermore, Paredes & Ribeiro (2018, September) state that while outdated project management roots mainly focused on responsibilities such as tactical planning and scheduling, AI will probably automate plentiful of that functionality thus shifting the core focus of Project Manager to considering the leverage of such technology in the delivery of more product value for customers.
Considering the virtual project teams, within several organizations, central internal project teams have been becoming smaller while distant project professionals’ reliance is increasing with the digital technology virtual workers do not necessarily require to be in the similar physical location but can be located anywhere in the globe, working in the organization’s virtual teams (Bierwolf et al., 2017, June). This aspect has been associated with numerous benefits such as minimizing travelling, logistic, together with other organization’s administrative costs. Further, with a project management software which supports task management can be indispensable to a managerial role. Conferring to Kerzner (2017), the project manager using such a tool can track projects working on and locate each of organization’s tasks. Without such software, it is impossible to manage many projects successfully at once effectively.
On project management methodologies, progressively, organizations and project managers appear to be searching for general methodology flexibility to accommodate fast-changing project settings. For instance, Padalkar & Gopinath (2016) suggest that Kanban in Agile methodology has been a more workflow-based and visual project management practice that prioritizes minor daily deliveries and render progress further measurable. In future project management, Kanban would work best when applied in projects more expected to involve several changes and provide an efficient approach to restraining work in progress while limiting project stagnation.
With new technology playing a progressive core role in the project management, project managers demand is increasing who have high emotional intelligence levels. Organizations would be under growing pressure to innovate, adapt to changes and realize strategic growth (Kerzner, 2017). Paredes & Ribeiro (2018, September) suggest that by 2027, a projected 87.7 million professionals would be functioning in managing time, costs, people, scope, and data as well as project-centric roles.
In due course, it is barely astonishing that project managers will be needed more than ever in future support driving change, device strategic initiatives and delivers innovation. Additionally, with a project management software in IA, which support work management, the tool can be essential to critical decision-making role in management. As Agile together with other critical project management approaches receive additional traction and develop more commonplace, the project managers would become familiar with a complete spectrum of methods and philosophies of project management. The future research will study in details how as project management evolve and projects continue to expand to the global market, and how the future project management will continuously change and further innovate with growing businesses.
References
Bierwolf, R., Romero, D., Pelk, H., & Stettina, C. J. (2017, June). On the future of project management innovation: a call for discussion towards project management 2030. In 2017 International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation (ICE/ITMC) (pp. 689-698). IEEE. https://doi: 10.1109/ICE.2017.8279952
Kerzner, H. (2017). Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.
Padalkar, M., & Gopinath, S. (2016). Six decades of project management research: Thematic trends and future opportunities. International Journal of Project Management, 34(7), 1305-1321. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2016.06.006
Paredes, C., & Ribeiro, P. (2018, September). Future Trends in Project Management. In 2018 International Conference on Intelligent Systems (IS) (pp. 637-644). IEEE. https://doi:10.1109/IS.2018.8710551