By Linky van der Merwe

“We live in a world where change is not just constant but its continuous.”

This is according to an article in Toolbox, called: “The Future of Project Management” by Bryan Campbell.

The impact on how we do projects is tremendous.  The planning and budgeting cycle of 12 months is becoming old as deployments become continuous.

Mr Campbell states that the traditional definition that a project is done when all of its scope is completed within schedule and budget needs to be re-assessed.  In this new paradigm, projects end when they stop delivering more value than the next viable alternative.  Budget and schedule are superseded by the value that projects deliver.  This means that trying to fix a schedule and budget on a project is less important than understanding the value that the project is delivering.

Continuous delivery

What we’re heading towards is that Projects will eventually transition into continuous value delivery mechanisms and the roles of the project manager will change from monitoring schedule and budget to one focused on the continuous delivery of value.

In his talk at PMXPO2018: “Planning for the future of Project Management”, Dr Harold Kerzner makes several observations on the differences between PM 1.0 and PM 2.0 that I find fascinating. Here are a few:

• Project requirements have evolved from well-defined to evolving and flexible.
• Number of constraints moved from triple (time, cost, scope) to competing constraints.
• Scope changes from minimum with low customer tolerance to possibly continuous with a high tolerance
• Amount of documentation is changing from extensive to minimal
• Project health checks, once optional, are now mandatory and so is customer involvement
• Project management area of emphasis has changed from planning, measuring and controlling to benefits realisation and value management

Lastly, according to Dr Kerzner, the metric categories have changed as well.

Trusted Global Network

Another interesting perspective comes from Ray Granger, CEO of Mavenlink. He talks about a transformation where organisations change their processes and structures to align with a global, networked landscape.

“Work is being delivered in open and collaborative environments, with large groups of people from both inside and outside the organization”, according to Mr Granger.

This means that on any given project, you may be working with internal talent, external service providers, specialists, and even clients from around the world. I’ve experienced this phenomenon on recent software implementation projects which requires you to engage and mobilize larger and larger numbers of participants, and facilitate much more complex coordination of expertise and activities. Part of the complexity lies in the challenges around collaboration with virtual team members across different time zones and having to keep all stakeholders aligned.

These are just a few directions that give us an indication of where Project Management is heading. We need to ask ourselves: “Am I keeping up with the pace of change, adapting my skills and leadership abilities to stay ahead of the curve, to be future fit?”

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