People sometimes ask me what will be the future trends in the project management to ensure project success. Yes, applying best practices on my project cannot guarantee this in today’s scenario when there is a huge inflation in our economy. Project waste is typically viewed in seven categories:
| 1. | Staff time on the project, |
| 2. | Non-human resources such as materials and equipment, |
| 3. | Methods that are not optimized, |
| 4. | Idle time while decisions are pending, |
| 5. | Using the wrong tools for activities, |
| 6. | Weak plan for implementation, and |
| 7. | Wrong skills assigned to the project. |
We know that discipline of planning, organizing, securing, and managing resources to achieve specific goals is the key definition of the Project Management since early civilization. As the price of resources increases, we need to find new and better methods of conducting project work to offset costs while remaining competitive in the marketplace. Hence we lead to the situation to forecast future trends in the project management. While it’s not possible to predict what’s going to happen in the future,it’s pretty easy to predict the trends in the field of project management. How? We can forecast the project management trends based on what has happened in the previous year and based on recent survey results. Following trends are the summary of the recent IT management trends based on recent management study reports and a few survey reports.
| Customer Trends – People from middle class society are increasingly making use of the Internet. |
| Economics Trends – India’s GDP is growing high and the progress is really remarkable in this year. |
| Business Trends – Outsourcing is growing and E-commerce has gone social now. Also, businesses want to sit next to the customer when developing products and services for better feedback. |
| Social Trends – People all around the world are started to use social networking sites such as Face book, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter to share their experience. |
Let’s try to forecast the trends based on the above mentioned survey results and trends. There is no doubt that today we will face more aggressive competition than in the past and the business environment we operate in is a highly turbulent one. Regardless of improvements in project management, there must be new methods of performing that saves on the cost of resources consumed to offset increases in price. Let see what I can. I would think that the following project management trends would take place
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Clear objectives that support the mission or purpose statement, emphasis client management. |
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Clear mission or purpose statement that describes what the project is to accomplish. More controlled requirements and processes definition. |
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A comprehensive list of facts and assumptions that are related to accomplishing the mission. Here where we need great emphasis on Risk Management too. |
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Well defined schedule to describe activities, their durations, and allocated resources. |
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Emphasis on leadership and good people management practices, proper resource management. |
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More use of free-wares, open source software and collaboration tools, emphasis on new technologies. |
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Proper quality control and a clear description of the periodic review practices. |
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A project close-out procedure that includes delivery of the product. |
Predicting the future is not an easy task because it has lot of complex uncertainty components and these predictions are based what happened in the previous year and recent in my management career.
If you think I have missed out on any trends which you think might happen in 2012, please share your views.
