A guest post by Mark Fromson

Digital Project Management (DPM) is a term that has gained currency in the past few years to describe an entire class of project managers working solely on digital projects. A digital project can be defined as a traditional software project, enterprise software implementation, web site, mobile app or anything in between. DPM Meetup groups have sprouted up in many cities (I founded the Vancouver chapter), and yearly DPM conferences are now happening in North America and England. For me, it finally feels like I have a support cohort, a group of people just like me, managing the same types of projects with the same types of processes, deliverables, tools and challenges that we all face.

So how is DPM changing? What are some of the main issues and challenges we are currently facing?

I’ll talk about two of these in this post – In-Person vs. Remote and Full Time vs. Contract. In my next post I will dive into the Agile vs. Waterfall debate.

• In-Person vs. Remote

• Full Time vs. Contract

• Agile vs. Waterfall

In-Person vs. Remote

It used to be that a digital project manager and their team all worked in an office together. The first staff members to go remote were developers, simply because there were never enough developers to go around and so you had to consider remote staff. Now with modern communication and collaboration software, even the project manager can be effective from a remote location. Skype, Slack, Basecamp, Jira; all these amazing tools allow a PM to stay on top of remote teams almost as well as being there in person. I say almost, because in-person collaboration and management will probably always be the best way to manage a project team. In-person communication allows for a level of interaction that remote tools currently don’t facilitate. In-person teams become more bought in to the goals and culture of the organization and also get more exposure to the innovation of their team members. The more bought in they are, the better they will perform. The more innovation they are exposed to, the more innovative work they are likely do. If you can get all (or most of) your team members under one roof, your project will have a better chance at succeeding than if those same team members are all in remote locations.

Full Time vs. Contract

The current workforce as a whole is steadily moving from a full-time model to a contract/freelance model. By some estimates, 50% of the workforce will be contract by 2020. I’m not sure I believe that number, but it certainly is trending that way. But to be a contract PM can be very difficult. Project Management is not about design or development’s distinct deliverables; it’s more about managing people and process. When you don’t know your team because you’re coming in on contract, it’s a lot harder to manage that team than if you’ve worked with them many times before in the same company. Also, many companies have very detailed processes and tools that they’ve defined in their PM office. If a company hires a contract PM, they often have to train them up on all those elements. For both these reasons, most companies still prefer to hire full time in-house PMs. I’ve been a freelance PM for 12 years, but I also had 7 years before that as an in-house PM to hone my people skills and be able to quickly adapt and learn a new companies tools and processes. I think more and more PM’s will eventually opt to go contract, but I expect they will be relatively senior before they make the jump and are able to be successful.

So those are some of digital project management’s current issues. If you’re local here in Vancouver, I invite you to come out to our Vancouver Digital Project Management Meetup group. You can find us at http://www.meetup.com/Vancouver-Digital-Project-Managers/.

Mark Fromson is the co-founder of LocalSolo.com, a convenient place for agencies, startups and businesses to find local and available high-quality freelance professionals.

Mark is also a freelance digital consultant specializing in digital project management, user experience and functional analysis. With more than 15 years experience garnered at top interactive agencies in the US and Canada, he has played roles in over 400 projects for over 150 clients in multiple industry verticals. You can find him at Fromsonconsulting.com.

Above image is created using Jason Davies Word Cloud Generator

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