Adjusting to a New Norm

Like most organizations, PMI has initiated a temporary work from home policy for all staff globally early last week to keep our workforce safe against the risks posed by COVID-19. 

Our top priority is the safety and well-being of each member of our community, and I’m grateful we took steps quickly and decisively. Now with all PMI operations being managed virtually for the time being, we are taking stock, striving to keep our teams motivated and remaining focused to serve our community.  This is a testament to the caliber of people on our team and our invaluable stakeholders, who are all rallying together in this difficult time.

There is a strong probability that that the way we and other organizations have been working these past few weeks will become a new norm. What if, when we finally reach the end of this crisis, we learn working virtually actually works better than we expected?

I don’t for a minute believe that we’ll ever eliminate the physical office. I don’t believe that overnight we will somehow transition to a fully virtual workforce even though in all respects that’s where PMI is now. But we have to recognize that given advances in technology and the lessons we’re all learning from this unprecedented, global and far-reaching epidemic, a material migration to a virtual workplace is possible and probably desirable. 

Even a limited transition would have enormous implications – in terms of real estate, human resource management, and technology. It would also drive changes in how we organize teams and manage work – which increasingly centers on implementing complex projects. Indeed, according to some of the data in our new report “Tomorrow’s Teams Today,” 42 percent of all projects today are characterized as “high complexity,” requiring an average of 24 core team members versus just eight for low complexity projects. 

But how do you manage complex projects when the members of large, cross-functional teams are highly dispersed – sometimes on a global basis? Here are a few suggestions:

• Double down on Agile. Agile methodology has its roots in the IT world but has been adopted by other industries and for more “tangible” projects. Agile is particularly useful in situations where there are many unknowns or where project specs change frequently. This collaborative, incremental, and iterative style of working is tailor made for our fast-paced, ever-changing world. According to our research, nearly one in four projects completed over the past year deployed Agile, and half of all Project Management Offices (PMOs) expect to increase their use of Agile over the next five years. 
• Leverage technology. Advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence can play an important role in helping teams organize work. In some cases, these technologies are powering estimating models that help define the size and scale of projects and the types of roles that will be needed to get work done. In other cases, they’re helping teams anticipate and address customer pain points. And the use of advanced technologies will only grow, as people increasingly work side by side with machines to perform their jobs. Deep rooted data analytics, machine learning and statistical modeling is helping the world to adopt strategies to curb COVID-19 and to also run millions of compound scenarios to fast track the search of a cure or vaccine. Something that would have taken years to do is now being done in months.
• Exercise the new “power skills.” Collaborative leadership skills are becoming a must for project managers, as well as many team members. These power skills – which include a variety of skills and attributes such as empathy, communication, emotional intelligence and a sense of shared responsibility – are especially important when working as a virtual team. Indeed, project professionals surveyed for our Pulse of the Profession research told us that they ranked collaborative leadership as the most essential team skill. We could describe many of these skills as necessary to beef up your AQ, or adaptability quotient. We’ve heard for a long time about the need to develop the ability to navigate unexpected change – and we are seeing that play out in real time today. 
• Stay focused on the customer. If collaboration is our survey’s top-ranked skill, “empathy for the voice of the customer” comes in a strong second. For dispersed team members, the voice of the customer serves as the center of gravity – the common purpose that anchors and unites all. High performance teams therefore build customer feedback into all project workflows. They know that customer centricity is the essential ingredient keeping the team focused on delivering meaningful value. 
• Maintain a robust management framework for virtual teams. Just because you don’t interact with your team face-to-face, you still need to maintain clear oversight of their workloads and responsibilities. Make sure you maintain a clear supervision and governance framework for projects and clearly define workflows so that team members can work in parallel and share their work in progress. 

Many teams are already embracing these principles and incorporating them in their project management toolkit. As work becomes more virtual – either as a result of unexpected events like the COVID-19 crisis or simply because it’s become the new norm – these rules of the road will increasingly govern how we organize teams, how we manage work, and how we address the challenges of an ever more complex world.