Project Management in the Digital Age

In my work as a project manager, I haven’t met anyone (read: last ten years) who thinks that project management hasn’t been shaken up by the Internet. Lots of jobs have suffered from—or benefited from, depending on your point of view—digital disruption. Gartner’s Nexus of Forces has become the way we do business and project management in the digital age. Businesses have had to adapt to take advantage of social, mobile, cloud, and data.

Or at least, the good ones have.

Project management was a bit slow to change. Now we’re seeing more movement towards adopting online project management tools and collaboration software to improve the ways teams work. My research in 2015 shows that 94% of project managers use collaboration tools at work. When I first did a similar study in 2010, I found that 70% of people using social and online tools in a project environment did so for document sharing. Today, it’s down to only 27%. That reflects a much wider use of collaboration tools. The 2015 survey showed that project teams are doing everything online, from assigning work to storing lessons learned.

Being ‘digital’ means more than just signing up for cloud-based services and hoping for the best. Successful teams must skill up for a complete shift, setting collaboration tools in a broader context.

Enter the Digital PMO

The concept of the Project Management Office (PMO) has been around for a long time. This function manages the practicalities of completing projects, from holding all the corporate templates to organizing training for project teams. The PMO can be staffed by someone who does the job part-time or an entire team – it really depends on the size of your business, but small companies benefit just as much from having the PMO role.

Traditionally, the PMO has been the guardian of standards and project management methodologies. They are becoming the guardian of digital assets such as project management software. Also, they handle the management of those, creating user accounts, and they were probably involved in selecting the product in the first place.

However, the shift to a digital way of managing projects goes further than having the right tech. It’s also about how you use the data those apps create.

Not only has there been a shift to digital, but the work culture has substantially changed in light of the pandemic and the Great Resignation of 2021—statistics show that working remotely, hence managing projects remotely, is the new norm—as outlined in this article on remote work.

Equipped for speed

What if you could provide information about your projects to anyone at any time on any device? How about having the possibility to use the data your teams collect to analyze which projects were profitable? What if your management team had the information they need to make decisions available to them in real-time? How much faster would your projects be?

Managing projects in a fully digital environment gives you all of that. You can tap into the big data accumulated from your projects to provide better management information. Digital tools also allow you to streamline workflows and give up end-of-month reporting. The more you can do in real-time, the easier it is for everyone.

Equipped for flexibility

Teams are more flexible and mobile than they’ve ever been. At the same time, many people are off the road less. They rely on web conferencing to get the job done and take part in events. The latest figures on remote working from GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com show that employees working at home (except self-employed people) grew by 6.5% last year. This is the most significant year-on-year rise since before the U.S. recession.

Let me give you an example of what that means for professionals. This year’s Canadian legal conference was offered to delegates as an in-person event and web conference. It allowed legal professionals to participate in professional development without leaving home.

Project leaders must equip teams with the tools they need, whether working from the kitchen table, the airport, or a client site.

Businesses of all sizes need to reprioritize work around a new opportunity. We’ve had this at work recently: a new project came into the team as a top priority. I had to review the task assignments, inform the staff of the requirements, and get back to the stakeholders to let them know that the new project had started. While the project that crossed my desk wasn’t about security, I imagine many executives have been initiating projects to plug holes following the TalkTalk breach recently.

In situations like this, it’s no longer practical to wait until the weekly meeting to juggle resources. We have to make quick decisions about who is taking on the new work and who is picking up the slack. By extension, we need to find what is going to stop for a while until we’ve got people to finish.

Being fast makes you responsive to business needs, so your managers feel good about working with you, and also gives you a fighting chance of delivering before your competition.

It’s probably not a surprise to you to read that the trend in project management is towards real-time processing and moving data online because it’s more efficient. But there’s something else at work here.

Transparency.

Equipped to share

Digital businesses are transparent. They share information with employees that they would never have done 20 years ago. Transparency is a cultural imperative in many workplaces now and is essential for cross-functional, multi-disciplinary project teams. Knowledge work—what I do all day, and I expect you do too—is about facilitating connections between people and tasks to get work done. A sharing culture makes offices radically different from the workplaces the Baby Boomers joined years ago.

Transparency matters not only because sharing knowledge is how we complete projects but also because it provides a business advantage. Share something that sparks an idea. You’ve created something compelling from the information you had all along.

Digital disruption hasn’t been comfortable, and it isn’t over yet. While ‘digital disruption’ might be one of today’s buzzwords, I predict the phenomenon will be around for a long time. We’ll continue to see the emergence of new ways to use the Internet at work. I’m sure it won’t be long before every team can use a 3D printer.

We need to take advantage of the tools that let us manage projects in a way that’s compatible with the speed of change.

The challenge for today’s business teams isn’t about installing a new cloud solution for task management or time tracking. It’s about how you use the data in the system after you’ve bought it to gain an advantage.

First published on November 2, 2015.