What is the Future of Project Management? Part 1: A Conversation with Andrew Netschay
Over the past few weeks we have been speaking with experienced project managers, people engaged in training project managers and various thought leaders in the space. This is all in preparation for our April 9 round table on project management.
If you can be in Vancouver we hope to see you there.
Many people have mentioned the following trends:
Routine aspects of project management are becoming easier to manage
There is a growing clash between agile and waterfall approaches
Top project managers are gravitating to jobs that provide more autonomy
Millennials will change how we need to approach project management
What do you think? Are these the key trends in project management? What would you add? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.
As TeamFit is obsessed with teams and how to build them, we also want to get project managers insights into the human (team) side of project management.
How often do project managers get to choose the team? When they do so what are the best ways to go about doing this?
What are the key things that a project manager can do to ensure that the team jells?
What can a project manager do to help individual team members succeed?
Over the next few weeks we will be sharing some of the insights that top project managers are sharing with us.
Andrew Netschay, a senior project manager who works primarily for very large organizations who often have government or quasi-government clients, had a lot to tell us about project management trends.
He sees a clear divergence between organizations that see project management as project administration and those that give the project manager more autonomy. He noted some large organizations embrace both approaches in different divisions and depending on the nature of the project.
Organizations with a project administration flavour have often invested a great deal in a project management office, have rigid processes, and treat the project manager as more of a project administrator. These organizations are committed to waterfall development (where a project is developed in well defined stages) and top down approaches. The project manager spends a great deal of time with Gantt charts and spreadsheets, checking boxes and preparing reports. This process driven approach is getting better and better support from software, often software included in or linked to larger enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
Other organizations take a more open approach to project management and look to the project manager to take a leadership role. In this case, Andrew sees the role of the project manager as one of translating the organization’s objectives into a set of deliverables and projects. This is often a form of program management. This is the kind of role Andrew prefers and the one in which he can have the most impact.
A useful article “Program Management vs. Project Management: 5 Critical Differences.”
Many organizations espouse agile development methodologies but have project management processes steeped in the Project Management Body of Knowledge and Project Management Best Practices (our advisor Philippe Kruchten will have some thoughts on this next week). This mismatch can put a lot of stress on the project manager who in practice becomes the interpreter between a development team’s agile approach and the formal and documented requirements of the project management office. Agile project management sounds good and gets a lot of words, but in the trenches, it is not widely understood or applied. So the project manager is again a translator (and shock absorber) between the project team and organization. In this case, the translation is from the rapid cycles of agile development to the formal reports and presentations required by the project management process.
For more on different approaches to project management see “Which Life Cycle is Best for Your Project?”
We asked Andrew about the role that project managers play in innovation and how innovation-driven projects might differ from other projects that are more concerned with implementation or systems migration. He countered by pointing out that in most large organizations any innovative project is going to require change management. So a project manager that is leading innovation or disruptive project is going to need to play a role as a cultural change agent and cultural change will have to be part of the project plan. The first place this will generally need to be applied is to the team itself.
Other Posts in the Open Conversation Series
Senior Consultants Consider Trends Affecting Future Work
Millennials –The Next Generation Workforce (and the Future of Consulting)
Round Table Discussion for Project Managers
