Step Aside Old-school Project Managers! There's a New Sheriff in Town
Organizations have gone through tumultuous iterations of project management processes. The traditional approaches of task management are beginning to look obsolete, meanwhile systems like Agile are shining brighter than ever.
Old Project Management in Shambles?
A comparative study has found that old methods of project management, such as included in PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) Guide, lack the right components to stay relevant in the current age. Such conventional methods do not have the flexibility and ahem the agility, to keep up with the pace of current project management issues. T. Williams (2005) has this to say about such methods:
"... inappropriate and potentially disadvantageous for projects that are structurally complex, uncertain, and heavily time-limited.
Instead, newer project management methods, such as "agile" or
"lean" show promise for projects with these characteristics."
In fact, the first time agile practices were included was in the PMBOK Guide's Sixth Edition, released on 2017. Well, that took them awhile... Hopefully, they can keep up next time!
New Players Shaking Up the Game
Project management meta changes fast. We are currently seeing many new developments coming due to technological advancements. One of such, probably the one with the most hype, is AI. AI features have been slowly getting deployed into various project management tools making them into AI task managers. But just how effective are they?
Artificial Intelligence features
On paper, everything with AI sounds impressive. And well, AI in the right hands is a handy tool that should be considered carefully. AI features help you to finish routine tasks much faster and in this way save a hefty amount of time. Smart analytics, predicting your scalability and helping you with on-boarding. This is just the tip of the iceberg, there are many other useful features which you should consider but understand that most of these features are paywalled, so get that wallet ready!
Re-iterating the New Methods
Besides recent technological developments can we make project management even more effective? Apparently, yes! Throughout the time of agile deployment some practices have been noticed as not as effective. And what do we do with such practices? We get rid of them!
Wasteful Agile
Weak agile practices have been described as wasteful. Sprints - a given holy grail that shall not be touched can actually be detrimental to your team. Unnecessary ceremonies can be a huge time-waste that serve nobody except the project manager who just wants to tick some boxes with the check mark. Instead, drop them and allow your team spend more time on refining.
Prioritization
Having trouble prioritizing work? One methodology shines great here, the grandchild of Agile - the Kanban prioritization system. A simple but adaptable methodology I recommend you to check it out, it's definitely the future of project management.
Wrap-up
At the end of the day, project management is here to stay. But it is an ever-changing process of how to do things more efficiently and both scientists and managers through diligent practice and experiment are finding out new things worthy of sharing. Technology is moving rapidly forward and only time will tell how project management will look in 2050. As of now, it's looking pretty exciting so don't miss the future of PM!
