Does the project profession have the skills needed to deliver 4IR technologies?

The APM is starting a conversation on the key issues affecting the future of the project management profession. The first question is about the challenge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In this article I offer some thoughts about the skills needed by project managers confronted by the opportunities presented by these new technologies. You can find out more on the web site.

4IR technologies hold tremendous potential for project delivery: Digital Twins, BIM, Project Lifecycle Management, Collaborative Working Environments can all deliver significant benefits and when combined the potential is huge. However, traditional project management skills are exactly the wrong skills to embrace this opportunity. Strict contractual relationships drive combative behaviours (and separation between systems), adoption of standard project management systems (often imported from other industries) create waste that is magnified by electronic systems and waterfall delivery models prevent the new benefits being taken when they become available. In my view using traditional PM approaches with 4IR technologies risks a result I call Digitally Enhanced Failure whereby data builds up at manual interfaces, waste is multiplied and decision making is confused by a mass of unhelpful data. So, what new skills do project managers need to take advantage of 4IT technologies?

1.      Collaboration: At its heart the 4IR technologies enable collaboration between organisations. To do this they require shared data (based on the product breakdown structure), concurrent processes and most importantly collaborative behaviours. The key skills that enable this are systems engineering and relational leadership. I’ll say more in a separate post on relational leadership, but without people adopting the right behaviours, sharing of common data in concurrent processes simply won’t work, however excellent a piece of systems engineering those systems may be. Finally, the software selected needs to be proven and have an open architecture to enable integration. This often means adopting n- 1th generation systems.

2.      Lean: The rule of process automation is to first lean out the As-Is process design, then digitise the data, then automate the processes. Very often when mobilising projects the first step is missed and the next two simply generate too much useless data, too quickly … Digitally Enhanced Failure. To take advantage of the 4IR, project managers need to be experts in lean: on a mission to make their process design as efficient as possible before they even start thinking about digital systems.

3.      Agile: Unsurprisingly perhaps, the third key skill comes from the digital world. Agile is not just for software design. Many companies are now using Agile to deliver whole platforms (e.g. SAAB’s Gripen E fighter jet). In large projects, Agile means thinking big, but starting small and incrementally delivering the full solution. Delivering benefit to the investor early by taking advantage of 4IR design technology which allows us to modularise the design, deliver a minimum viable product early and build features in during build and operation until full capability is delivered.