There’s no denying that project management today looks different to how it did even 5 years ago. Project management trends shape our profession. We see technology evolving, new tools, consolidation, innovation and more.
Trends come and go, or they stay with us and evolve into new ways of working that stick around and become “the way we do things around here.”
Change is inevitable – we all know that. So what are the emerging trends in project management that are going to shape how you do your job in the future? And how can you benefit from them? Well, I have the answers for you. Read on!
How project management is evolving
The trouble with trends is that you might not notice they are happening. Often, ‘trend’ is shorthand for the prediction of a gentle evolution. You just carry on doing your job and you don’t notice the world shifting under your feet.
Until it’s too late.
Staying relevant in a fast-changing business environment is part of the job these days. We all need to be following what’s happening in consumer and commercial environments so we can keep our skills up.
The way tech, economic, social and environmental considerations are evolving – heck, even the way public health affects workforce planning – will impact the way projects are run.
10 Project management trends you need to know
Leaders need to know how the world around them affects the work they are doing today, and how to plan to capitalize on those trends in the future.
Ready to find out more? Here are the top project management trends that are already shaping the world of project delivery.
1. Data analytics
Bringing more data professionals into projects was a theme of Andy Murray’s column in Project magazine’s Winter 2023 edition, and it’s still relevant today.
APM now has a Data Advisory Group. Questions like: “Do we need project data analysts or translators?” now come up in board room discussions.
Data analytics is all about using current and past project data and predictive data to help people make better decisions. It gives us the information to bust myths, uncover truths and reinvent how projects get done.
Why is it important?
You can only get the benefit from data if you know how to use the data.
A huge trend at the moment is making sure that the vast amount of data in our project management software is accessible, presented in an understandable, meaningful way and available to decision-makers.
What you can do
- Look at what data is available on your project and consider if it is being used to its full advantage.
- Take the Google Data Analytics Certificate for an introductory, solid understanding of what can be done with data – it’s eye-opening!
- Consider the bias in your data and how that might influence decisions.
2. Managing a hybrid, multi-generational team
Project leaders today have to manage a hybrid workforce. Your project team is no longer guaranteed to be in the office every day.
Remote work has always been part of the project ecosystem, from off-shoring and near-shoring development and customer services but now even the colleague who lives down the road is likely to be in her home office at least some of the week.
On top of that, we’re facing the first time that 4 generations have been in the workplace together. Managers need to adapt their leadership styles to better address how different team members want to work and be managed.
Why is it important?
“The only positive thing to have come out of this pandemic was the (at first) necessity and (later) willingness for employers to embrace flexible work,” says Amanda Haynes, Marketing Manager at Ganttic.
“Remote and hybrid work has been a boon for employee work/life balance (what we now call work/life integration) and often a prerequisite for new employees. Since 91% of US workers want to work at least somewhat remotely in the future,” she adds. “And since we’re already in the middle of the great resignation, companies need to be willing to allow this work model in order to retain their employees.”
What you can do
- Embrace the trend. It benefits you as well, not to be in the office every day.
- Listen to your team. Find out how individuals want to work as well as how the team overall wants to work.
- Use tools designed to help keep your remote and hybrid team on the same page.
- Be willing to incorporate a few different tools to meet the varied needs of your colleagues.
3. More trust, less control (especially in remote teams)
If nothing else, the coronavirus pandemic has shown us that remote teams are an effective way of working. Businesses that resisted the shift to Zoom meetings are now embracing the flexibility that remote teams give them.
Project managers need to be competent in leading remote teams and working with colleagues online, and that means a different approach.
“There is already a shift in employer-employee relationships,” says Jacob Udodov, Founder and CEO of project and task management platform, Bordio. “And there will be more changes in the next few years. What we practice already and more and more companies are adopting is more trust and less control. Results are what’s important, and it doesn’t matter how many hours employees spent at their desks or what time they logged in today. If the deadline is met and the end-product is great, why micromanage the rest?”
Couldn’t agree more! A results-oriented workplace is where we should all have been for some time, and finally that’s gaining traction.
Why is it important?
Remote work gives you flexibility. It stops you having to rely on people who work in your local area and means you can draw on subject matter expertise from wherever the best people happen to be.
In the APM Salary and Market Trends survey 2021, 61% of respondents reported that working from home options were an important criterion for choosing a new role, up from 52% in 2020.
People want flexible options for work.
WFH and flexibility also minimize our impact on the environment by cutting down on commuting, give us more time in the day (which many people then spend working instead of traveling) and improve work/integration balance.
What you can do
- Brush up on your virtual leadership skills.
- Think about how you are going to run remote team meetings and workshops – it is different to holding meetings face-to-face.
- Assume trust in a remote team, but consciously try to build it as well.
- Make sure you’re alert to burnout in remote teams. Research from Gallup shows that nearly 80% of full-time employees experience burnout on the job at least sometimes.
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4. Integrating change management for project success
Too much of project management focuses on building and completing something. There’s not enough focus on whether the people receiving the ‘something’ are actually ready to work with it.
“Reimagine the must-have project management skills,” says Brantlee Underhill, Managing Director, North America, Project Management Institute (PMI). “Project management isn’t just about managing spreadsheets and timelines. The projects of the present and future need project managers who are strategic partners and changemakers. In addition to business acumen, the top bracket of project managers deploys interpersonal skills like relationship building, collaborative leadership, strategic thinking, creative problem solving, and commercial awareness.”
You might be lucky and have change managers working in your business. Or you might be like most of us and have to do the
Relationship building is one of those cross-over areas that relates to both project management and
Without
Why is it important?
Here’s an example of how project communications are changing, and how we can tap into that for better
In 2021, Cisco estimated that 82% of consumer internet traffic was video. If that’s what your stakeholders are doing on the internet outside of work, how do you think they are going to want to get status updates and briefings at work?
Research by Vidyard and Demand Metric reports that video converts better than any other content type. In other words, it shifts behavior. It gets people to buy or sign up or whatever.
And my own research during the winter of 2017 shows that getting people involved in projects is still the most challenging part of getting work done. Stakeholder relationships are a huge area of concern for project managers.
Video shifts behavior? I’ll have some of that please.
Yes: video is coming to employee communications and to how we become changemakers and engage others.
To a certain extent, it is already here. Some companies are already using video as part of staff onboarding and training.
What you can do
- Read up on
change management – learn what it is and how to best apply it to projects. - Take a
change management class (like my fab workshop which has loads of templates and support resources included). - Look at your project schedule and consider whether you have truly incorporated enough
change management activities (and time/budget for those activities) in the plan.
5. Soft skills and EQ as a differentiator for leaders
Emotional intelligence is one key skill that it’s worth calling out because it’s about how you operate in your environment.
Your project environment is a complex socio-political web of interactions, populated with people who know what they want, most of the time. And those wants don’t always play nicely together.
As in the past, we’ll see soft skills valued more highly – perhaps valued more highly that credentials. As the demand for project management work grows, certification schemes are a simple way to differentiate candidates, but being able to operate effectively within the organization is key to getting things done.
Why is it important?
The trend towards valuing soft skills is important because as automation and AI bring advanced features to our tools, much of the ‘technical’ bits of project management can be done by software.
I see a day in the not too distant future where you plug your task information into a tool and out pops an estimate, based on the last 12 projects using the same resource and qualitative data on past performance. The tech is already there – it’s just a case of making use of it.
That means your interpersonal skills are more important than ever – the shift is to project managers being awesome at stakeholder engagement, conflict resolution,
Emotionally intelligent project managers are in demand. The exec team need to know that you aren’t going to do or say something to upset anyone. Beyond that, being able to look out for your team takes being able to interpret social cues and people with high EQ find that easier to do.
What you can do
Read next: 15 easy-to-do types of professional development
6. Resilience as a priority
Project work is stressful, we know that. I’ve written in the past about the results of my survey into why people are leaving project management. And let’s face it, so far this decade hasn’t exactly shaped up to be that great for many people’s mental health.
Safeguarding our emotional and mental health and that of our teams has to be up there as a trend for the forward-thinking leadership team. Resilience as an individual, resilience for the project, and business resilience are all essentials for the next 12 months.
Businesses were quick to put in place the resources to help staff work remotely. But the associated support networks for remote and hybrid work haven’t been as quick to appear. And given the ongoing disruption, frequent ups and downs and economic fallout that has happened recently, resilience is top of my personal list for next year.
“What businesses didn’t have the time or realization to do at the time, was to provide their people with the mental support they needed to adjust to this change,” says Karine O’Donnell, Director, project trainer and coach at Australian consultancy, Projecting With People.
“More and more, projects are being impacted by emotional and cultural factors caused by the changes to how people are working,” she adds. “I’ve already seen several organizations planning projects to support the emotional needs of the hybrid model of working, where some of the team work-from-home and some work from the office.”
Karine predicts that more organizations will start projects to support well-being at work including:
- New HR regulations for people working full or part-time from home
- Time sheeting projects to help businesses address productivity concerns
- Digital tools to facilitate online collaborations, task completion, project planning and management
- Online mindfulness programs to support staff anxiety, stress, and burnout.
Why is it important?
People are our most valuable asset. It’s not enough to simply do the work. We have to do the work in a way that doesn’t destroy us.
The Great Resignation, quiet quitting, workplace stress, and having to hold the fort while colleagues are off have all taken their toll on teams.
In a research report by the UK’s Ministry of Defence into psychological safety in major projects, projects that scored in the top quartile for high psychological safety had 47% higher median wellbeing scores than the lower quartile. That’s basically saying that teams that put effort into creating psychological safety have better wellbeing (and higher resilience, I’d add).
Looking out for each other should be a top priority.
What can you do?
- Use resource reporting to check workloads and ensure no one is overloaded. If you don’t have resource management tools, do a verbal check in with the team at least once a week.
- Create psychological safety at work so people feel it’s OK to tell you they are struggling.
- Live it. Don’t be the kind of boss that says everyone should have a work/life integration and yet send emails at 2am while you’re still working. Model the environment you want to create.
7. Artificial intelligence and RPA
This won’t be news to you: everyone is talking about AI being a powerful trend for the coming years. There are lots of applications for this in project management software including:
- Identifying potential risks through natural language search
- Improving risk assessments
- Testing risk response
- Allocating resources and resource levelling
- Intelligent, real-time scheduling
- Automating mundane and repetitive tasks
- Improving consistency in process and decision making.
However, AI is more likely to be suggestive rather than active, as Dennis Kayser points out in this podcast on the DPM website.
Remember the paperclip in Microsoft Office?
Clippy was early suggestive AI, bringing you “helpful” suggestions. It was so helpful that Time declared Clippy one of the 50 worst inventions of all time.
AI is coming to the tools you use, but let’s hope that the developers have learned the lesson of the doomed paperclip.
Bots are another aspect of this: if you’ve had auto-responses through Facebook Messenger or used a Slackbot then you’ll have seen them in practice. I think there are some good uses for this such as opting in to receive status updates, sending team member reminders and so on.
RPA is Robotic Process Automation. It’s a way of automating repetitive tasks and it’s having a bit of an impact on the PMO community. As a way to save time, it has huge potential, so expect to see more of that in your Project Office.
Why is it important?
Tech is always evolving, and if you want to stay relevant in the marketplace, you need at least some understanding of what’s happening to the tools you use.
Ultimately, AI, bots and RPA are there to make lives easier for project teams, streamline tasks and give us more time to do the stuff that robots can’t do.
“If you can have your project management tool do more for you without lifting a finger, you can save money and increase productivity,” says Lindsey Allard, CEO and Co-Founder of PlaybookUX. “Use automation to help you to perform basic tasks, organize specific things, and even compile helpful data.”
She adds: “I’ve seen how helpful automation can be in regards to project management and I look forward to seeing how automation can elevate my processes in the coming year.”
Varada Patwardhan, Managing Director at Xebrio, agrees. “The role of project managers in the industry is evolving into project leaders,” she says. “They will be expected to integrate AI capabilities in their project management styles and give more emphasis on their emotional intelligence and soft skills like ideation, communication, and problem-solving skills.
For project leaders and organizations, implementing AI capabilities can help attain transparency. AI can accurately identify potential risks in a project and augment a project leader’s decision-making ability by analyzing data from multiple projects at the same time.”
What you can do
- Look at how you can leverage the AI capabilities of the tools you already have.
- Look at how you could adopt new tools with automation and AI features to speed up repetitive work and data analysis.
8. A strategic shift for PMOs
With tools becoming smarter (more on that in a minute) and automations taking some of the grunt work out of project data crunching, what’s the future for the Project Management Office?
PMOs are here to stay in my view, but they might look different as they evolve to meet the changing needs of organizations.
For example, instead of putting together a strategic plan for what projects are going to be delivered over the next 3 years, they may be called on to answer “How” questions instead like these:
- How can we optimize our processes?
- How can we make a splash in a new market?
- How can we launch a new product in 4 months?
“I believe the PMO will have to focus on those more strategic areas and shift away from specifically defining the teams and resources that will do the work,” says Bill Raymond, host of the Agile in Action podcast. “Moreover, the PMO may be removed from tracking those efforts after the problems have been identified and the teams set the work into motion.”
Why is it important?
Bill says that with cross-functional projects – especially those that are highly visible – it’s almost a given that a PMO will be set up to track and plan the work.
“Moving forward, organizations will put the tracking and delivery of the work on the teams and tools,” he says. “PMOs will be reporting centers and support the teams in addressing major issues or risks that the teams escalate.”
What you can do?
- Think about how your PMO teams are rewarded. Are they rewarded based on things within their control, or is an aspect of the bonus dependent on other people completing projects within a given time? What would make it fairer?
- Determine business outcomes and priorities and start operating strategically within the PMO, even if it isn’t demanded of you yet.
9. Customization of project management tools
Customization is where you can tailor your messages effectively to the audience to the point that they think they are getting a more personalized service, but without too much work behind the scenes.
It’s another consumer trend. When I first wrote Social Media for Project Managers, I was reporting on consumer trends that were making their way into the business environment.
When the book was updated and reissued as Collaboration Tools for Project Managers, we saw that a lot of the consumer uses of social media were firmly embedded in collaboration tools: think features like chat, file sharing, liking and gamification etc.
Perceived customization is another example of a growing consumer marketing and tech trend that will find its way into how we manage change.
One aspect is all about making sure people see the right data at the right time, and smart analytics is definitely going to shape how we process data as project professionals.
“The predictive analytics space will be a completely new market to figure out,” says Ryan Fyfe, COO of Workpuls. “Primarily because those might model for strategic intent, human strategic intent. We’re going to have predictive analytics that not just look at what somebody does but tries to figure out why they do it, and figure out how their decision-making process works. It’s going for a much higher level of insight than you can get by looking at the person’s behavior alone.”
Rich data will help tailor the project management journey for stakeholders and help leaders make smarter choices about what next steps to take when the environment seems uncertain.
Who knows, we might see more virtual reality environments, tailored to our stakeholders, in the years to come.
Why is it important?
Customization is a different take on tailoring your approach and communications to suit the audience. Within project management tools, I want to see the things relevant to me. My sponsor wants to see different things, like real-time information on progress and budget. The data we both need is different, but obviously drawn from the same data set.
It’s all possible with a few clicks and a smart set up. One-size-fits-all doesn’t cut it any longer. Did it ever?
What you can do
- Look at how you can customize your project management software to present data intelligently to different groups via reporting and dashboards.
- Ask stakeholders how they would like to receive project information and customize to the best of your ability to make it relevant (and therefore more likely to be read).
Need advice choosing the right tool? We’ve partnered with software comparison portal Crozdesk to bring you expert suggestions. They’ll call you to find out your needs and then recommend products to fit — massively cutting down your time to shortlist suitable project management software.
10. Tailoring project management methodologies
Are you waterfall or
And let’s be honest, there aren’t only two ways of doing work: linear and predictive methods are simply two ends of a spectrum of tools and techniques and you pick where you sit on that spectrum based on the risk and uncertainty level of your project, amongst other things.
With the
But do project managers have the skills to tailor their approaches?
Tailoring requires professional judgement. It requires being able to differentiate between the benefits of
What matters is whether you can get the job done in a way that works for your business. If that’s a blended approach, and I’m seeing that more and more, then good for you. If pure Scrum works, or you’re totally a waterfall shop, then as long as you are seeing results no one is going to care.
Having spoken to a lot of project managers over the last year, formal training seems harder and harder to come by, and more and people are having to take responsibility for their own career development. And this is a global project management trend.
If project success rates are going to go up – and they really should – then value and business benefit are where we should be putting our energy. Not into what template you need to use or whether it’s a ‘risk log’ or a ‘risk register’.
However, it’s still not widespread or adopted reliably and effectively.
There’s a trend, in my opinion, towards more intelligent adoption of
Why is it important?
Today, more than ever, we need flexible ways of working.
We have to be able to change and adapt to market conditions, but the type of work we do often needs input from specialists, meaning the ‘traditional’ multi-functional and self-sufficient Scrum team doesn’t work for every project that would benefit from
Hybrid project management works – we know that. This trend is important because ultimately business value is the only thing that matters.
As project managers, we want (and need, if we care about our careers) to deliver something brilliant that is valued by the organization. Who cares how you get there? Methodology is not a competition.
The complexities of your project management environment are encouraging more managers to seek out mentors and coaches for themselves and their teams to learn from others.
That makes tailoring decisions easier, because you’ve got support and past experience to draw from as well as your own theoretical knowledge.
Oh, and that is something I can help with, if you are looking for a professional project management mentorship scheme.
What you can do
- Look critically at the project management methodology in use and consider if it really fits your project. Make conscious decisions about how to work effectively.
- Be brave with your tailoring. Flex your
agile approach to truly suit the needs of the team members. - Share your
agile knowledge with people outside your immediate team. Ops teams and others can benefit from a smart way to manage their work. - Find a mentor with experience to help you make tailoring choices.
- Don’t be snooty about
agile or non-agile – whichever side of the fence you come down on as a personal preference. You can combine them and still get the work done. We’re all friends in project management, and we all have the same goal: delivery. - Be open and collaborative. Work with your colleagues to learn about their best practices and bring your knowledge together to create the perfect solution for your teams.
Now you’ve seen what’s coming in the short term, why not check out what the future of project management holds for us? Get ready… more change is coming!
