How Project Management Has Changed Over The Past Decade & How To Catch Up In Order To Stay Competitive

How Project Management Has Changed Over The Past Decade & How To Catch Up In Order To Stay Competitive

Think about whenever someone says the line, 'you've changed'. Feels uncomfortable, right?The idea of things shifting beyond all recognition scares most people—because humans, by nature, are uncomfortable with the unfamiliar.?

However, let us be real here; evolution is a fact of life, whether it is to do with a person or to do with business. In fact, effective business at its core is just a collective of individuals working towards a common goal.?

Which brings me to project management.

This often unsung hero of success business administration is all about helping teams navigate the unfamiliar, and yet it's undergone its own unrecognisable evolution in the past 20 years, when I myself started my career in project management. Heck, almost 100 years ago, managing teams was a totally different beast to what it is today.?

In the 1950s, project management was merely a mechanism to help streamline the rapidly growing manufacturing industries. There was very little psychology or room for adaptability required; in fact it was largely discouraged in favour of rigidity and a 'one-size fits all' approach. Did it suit the ultra-predictable local-centric workflow of the mid-century? Yes. Does it work in today's fast-paced, multi-tasking, globally-minded marketplace? Not really.?

The fact is, change can make people uncomfortable—sometimes—but as it is with all periods of transition, they're usually for the greater good.?And when it comes to project management, here's how I have seen things shift not just this past decade but perhaps the last two...

Flexibility

The introduction of stringent, agile and transparent ways of delivering projects. As the workplace changes, so has the discipline of project management. In fact the only constant in project management is change, just as in life. At its core the discipline of project management is about navigating change in a structured manner to manage risk and increase output.

The complexity of projects has however necessitated a change to our approach. The need to be flexible has become paramount. These days, different industries use different styles of project management. More and more projects are separated into smaller tasks, each handled individually with a greater focus on culture, flexibility, and the concept of failing fast.

Project management has become more flexible in response to changing demands. Nowadays, it isn’t enough to deliver a project on time and on budget. Many projects have varying degrees of success, are ongoing, or have changing targets. They can involve multiple stakeholders across departments, divisions and even externally which adds to the complexity of running projects as each has to be managed accordingly.

As a result, project managers have earned their respect and project management has become recognised as an official career with great prospects. The days of assigning one's personal assistant or the department's secretary and or having one unqualified person delegate tasks are over. The world is moving faster, and a project manager has to keep track of all elements of a project. It’s a demanding role that has become a science with a touch of art.

The fast-paced business environment means adequate resource planning is crucial as there are so many overlapping elements and complex inter-dependencies that require immediate attention. The linear management methods no longer work. Collaboration between teams and leaders has becomes a critical component of the success of project management. Back in the day managers were overly territorial about their teams and would hog them for their own benefit, putting critical intra or inter-company projects at risk. The recognition of project teams instead of individuals has to a large degree eradicated this silo mentality and continues to evolve.

Big Data

The Wu-Tang Clan's famous line "cash rules everything around me" might've rung true for the business world of yore, but when it comes to making power-moves in project management, nothing delivers results like data.?

This is an industry built on efficiency. From researching a suppliers output capacity, through to determining the training timelines for team members, we can use this data to predict trends and future events decades and even centuries in the future.?

While our predecessors relied merely on experience and (in many cases) their wits, we are lucky these days to boost productivity based on reliable technology. The results? Hopefully, team members allocated to projects they are best (and happiest) at, and the ability to decipher bottlenecks with clever 'what if' analysis from Artificial Intelligence.

In a sense, whilst modern project management is about resourcing a project and tracking its success; there is something to be said for spending the time up-front to collect enough relevant data to be able to predict the future.?This way you are able to avoid waste, a big thing in project management.

Communication & Collaboration

Whether or not you think it's good that we're all always on our smartphones, the truth is that our ultra-connected world has delivered super-strides in the project management industry.?

In the past, the connection between suppliers and management teams were siloed and left room for error, often resulting in massive budget blowouts.?These days there are countless options for project management software designed to make each team member's role entirely transparent for all stakeholders.?

I'm talking about ProofHub, Zoho and even Monday.com?for less complicated projects. It has never been easier to bring teams together and reduce wait-times for questions and queries.?At Uyandiswa, we recently implemented Monday.com and we are starting to reap the rewards. Of course, I am not in any way advocating for any of the above, do your research and find what best suits your requirements.

No more underperformance due to ignorance. If a team member needs guidance, their manager is only a click or a DM (direct message) away. Feedback and clarifications are almost instantaneous.?No more wasted time. Once a team member has completed a task, they can easily identify areas that need attention.?

And this neatly brings me to my next point...

Accountability

This new kind of ultra-transparent digital workplace has revolutionised one of project management's largest challenges: underutilised team members. To put it nicely.?

I've mentioned how humanity and business are one and the same. It can be the best and sometimes the most brutally difficult thing about running a successful team. People can be creatively unpredictable and have periods of intense focus and then lags of underproductivity.?

People can feel unsure of themselves or be subject to moments of pride, whereby they do not want to ask questions for fear of looking inexperienced.?They can also be overconfident and charge ahead in the wrong direction without pausing to clarify their decisions.?

Modern project management has almost completely reduced the need for guesswork by making every team member accountable not only for themselves but for each other, with every person's output visible to everyone else.?Think daily stand ups as well.

Yes, this is a long way of saying that nobody wants to look silly in front of their peers, however, when you are dealing with people, it can help to take advantage of a person's core driver—herd mentality. Essentially, not wanting to get left behind.

Benefits Tracking

A very important evolution that I have observed is the emphasis on benefits tracking. Gone are the days when budgets were assigned to projects and senior management would hope for the best outcome without a clear picture of how this change would improve the bottom line.

Benefits tracking clearly shows how the projects or initiatives will achieve their desired outcomes and how those outcomes will help the organisation realise its imperatives. It is of most importance that projects or initiatives are implemented to address the organisation's SWOT: help in capitalising on Strengths, managing it's Weaknesses, taking advantage of Opportunities and mitigating against Threats.

Benefits must be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. If a benefit does not comply with these parameters, you may need to re-visit the investment. All benefits should contribute directly to the bottom line of the organisation. The evolution also shows that gone are the days when everything had to be measured in direct financial metrics. People wellness and improvement in customer care or management have proven to be some of the biggest unquantifiable benefits if only looked at through the financial eye, yet, these ultimately contribute to the bottom line. The awareness that you look after the people and the bottom line takes care of itself is something I have personally lived by.

Employee satisfaction, improved controls, customer insights and compliance are all contributors to the bottom line and ignore them at your own peril.

In order to ensure that benefits are effectively identified, tracked and realised, a benefits management framework, which forms part of the project and programme lifecycle, needs to be put in place. From project approval, through to delivery, implementation and post-implementation phases, the benefits management framework is like the compass that you have to consult regularly to make sure that you are still on the right track and will deliver what has been promised. It is essential that benefits are identified up front, aligned to the organisational goals and tracked through to realisation. If not done, think of it as money down the drain.

How Effective Project Management Can Impact Your Bottom Line

The reality is that the world shows no signs of slowing down, and as decisions get made faster, deadlines get shorter and are more complex, effective team management is more essential than ever.?Pair that with tighter budgets, and the stakes get even higher.?

Many major businesses such as Amazon and Apple have spent decades adapting their project management systems. Post the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw every company rapidly transition their workflows to play catch-up. These changes were often scary and hard for people; however in the long-run, businesses saw a massive improvement in output, leadership and overall happiness thanks to transparency (long may it last!).

The below was part of an article published by Michelle LaBrosse PMP, founder of Cheetah Learning. I couldn't have written it better myself and the truth is that it doesn't matter where you are in the world, most of the lessons in project management are common throughout. She says, project management helps organisations to:

1. Develop clear and quantifiable goals. If a goal is murky and indistinguishable, how does anyone know when and if it's done? Don't hide behind a curtain of vagueness. Be clear and make it measurable because a wise woman once said, "What gets measured, gets done!"
2. Track time and money spent. When you can show your boss and your team exactly where you are both in terms of time allocated and actual money spent, you're speaking their language. Nothing makes upper management quiver more than not knowing where they are on a mission-critical project.
3. Meet deadlines and milestones. If your team is missing every single deadline and project milestone, there's generally a reason why. Don't accept this as normal. Do you have too many false deadlines in your company culture, so people no longer accept them as real? When you understand what impedes meeting deadlines, you can get answers that not only get your project back on track, but save your organisation time and money.
4. Unearth the hidden gems in your project agreement and documentation. Too many people mistake documentation as busy work instead of using it to get at its real value. When you close out a project, don't literally put it to bed. Instead, wake up and unearth all the gems inside it. Did you have enough resources allocated to this project? At what points did this project falter and why? What was behind the cost variance between our original budget and actual budget? If you don't capture the intelligence in your documentation, understand it and share it, you've missed a huge opportunity to make you and your team more productive, effective and efficient.
5. Create a consistent and standardised approach to project management. I know this seems like a no-brainer, but I see companies every day that expect their people to learn project management by osmosis. I know you've seen this too: "Let the new people shadow Gloria for a few days because she's a great project manager." This is a good start, but you can't have enterprise-wide impact from project management unless you have a consistent way of approaching project management. This is why the PMP certification has become important to many businesses and government. These organisations have started to see the value of having whole teams and whole departments - and even entire companies - working from the same body of knowledge.

Project Management continues to evolve like any industry. The methodologies we have seen erupt over the last two decades have also ensured that project professionals keep abreast of the trends and ways of working to effectively maximise their delivery of projects. The power to harness the collective lies in the lessons learnt over a period of time and using data points to predict the future. Having qualified and experienced people who have earned their stripes and wear the scars of such a high pressure industry is often the difference.

Change is hard, but these days, it's not just necessary, it's inevitable.?Let us at Uyandiswa help you with your end-to-end project management needs. Contact us at [email protected]

Amanda Dambuza PMP is the founder and Chief Executive Officer at Uyandiswa Project Management Services. She has led the company to incredible success since she founded it in 2013 subsequently leaving her corporate job to run it a couple months later.