2015 was a year of change for many people. The impact of the contingent economy on professional services companies became a common theme, as was the need for these companies to become agile and make better use of the skills available.

Individuals were feeling the pressure as well. Project managers were challenged to stretch their own skills while at the same time getting a better understanding of the skills of the people on their team and how to put them together so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

These themes could be seen in the top posts on the TeamFit blog in 2015.

1. What is the Future of Project Management? A Conversation with Andrew Netschay
   Our top post was a guest post by senior project manager Andrew Netschay. Andrew is a well-respected project manager in Vancouver who works on projects of many different scales in the IT industry.

2. From Greenhouse to TeamFit to Degreed – a host of startups are unbundling the Talent Management Sector
   Next up was TeamFit Co-Founder Amar Dhaliwal. Amar is one of the people who built the talent management software industry, as we know it today. He uses his experience and his new role leading a start-up to look at how the landscape is changing. His basic point is that best of breed point solutions are cracking apart the monolithic solutions of the past decade.
   Then came a set of posts on how professional services companies are responding to change. The three forces driving change are

   • The explosion in the range of skills required to serve clients

   • The shift to the gig economy and the need to leverage extended talent networks

   • The growing importance of big data, data analytics and visualization in providing consulting services

3. Remaining Relevant In the Workplace of the Future. Focus on skills, not jobs

4. Why, when and how external consultants are brought onto teams

5. Will contingent work change the consulting business?

6. To win in professional services apply the right skills to the right project at the right time

Themes for 2016

The main theme will be a surprise! Our users, our readers, our social and work networks and our guest bloggers will come up with all sorts of new ideas and concerns that need to be addressed.  Let us know what is on your mind, suggest posts and we are glad to entertain guest posts.

We do expect to go deeper into skills, asking what are the emergent skills, how are different skills being put together and how are skills applied to get work done.

We haven’t forgotten about teams. The key place we apply our skills is with other people. For most of us that means we apply our skills in teams.

The ongoing pressure on professional services to evolve will also be an important theme as it is the context in which a growing number of people work. Even hardcore product companies are finding that with the emergence of new technologies, like the Internet of Things, that they have to provide solutions and not just sell products. This requires investment in professional services, directly or with partners.

The TeamFit platform will also continue to evolve. We are hard at work on Version 2, which will be a more open approach with a lot more data integration and analytics.

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