Major Trends to Monitor ''Pulse of the Profession''

To understand what differentiates highly successful project management from less successful project management, it is best to step back and look at the big picture of the environment in which projects are operating. Three inter-related drivers impact many organizations today: slow economic growth, shifting global market priorities and a push for innovation. These three factors all make for a very complex and risky business environment and emphasise the need for excellence in project, program and portfolio management.

The Future

Organizations will renew their focus on talent development as they grow and gain a competitive advantage in new markets. PMO managers believe that the skill sets of their project and program managers were a top concern of the most critical factors for success.

Tight economic conditions will continue to force the issue of good project portfolio management. Selection of the right projects and resourcing those projects for success will be critical to the efficient achievement of an organization’s strategy.

As organizations continue to strive for agility to leverage ever-shifting market conditions, change management and project risk management will become even more important core competencies. For some, a refocus on excellence in basic project management execution may be well rewarded.

The desire for organizational agility will also lead to increased iterative/incremental project management methods such as agile and extreme. If you wish to learn more about the agile method, take a look at our Certified Agile Project Management course that enables you to integrate Agile principles & values into your management style to get better results.

Despite tight economic conditions, organizations have been and will continue to increase their focus on benefits realization (in addition to cost and time) as a project and program success metric. The research found that the most important skill for managing today’s complex projects and programs is aligning the team to the vision of the project and designing the project’s organizational structure to align people and project objectives. This more strategic view of the project helps maintain a focus on the intended benefit the project was meant to deliver.

Source
PMI’s Pulse of the Profession is an annual global survey of practitioners and project management leaders. The latest survey contains feedback from over 1,000 professionals across a variety of experience levels and industries.