The biggest challenge in future project management is cultural change

Author: Hugo Ascacíbar 
Change Manager at Grupo Santander, PMP®

The biggest challenge in future project management is culture change. Culture change of operations and development teams as well as more automation in the delivery tools of the software form part of the new work culture of the digital world like DevOps an idea developed by John Allspaw, senior vice-president of technical operations, and Paul Hammond, engineering director of Flickr at his conference “10 deploys per day Dev & Ops cooperation at Flickr” that took place in 2009 at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference [i].

This philosophy implies that project management will be in real time and the products delivered online. This culture change, of agile tools and processes causes the management of projects is oriented towards the management of the product, the expectations of the users, combined with the processes of engineering.

This new way of working is also making leadership styles change towards more horizontal, open and participatory models, which is maybe one of the biggest challenges.

Project Management in the Digital Society

Author: Hugo Ascacíbar 
Change Manager at Grupo Santander, PMP®

The current trend in project management is the adoption of new ways of working with the goal of helping the project teams, co-operate and communicate, especially on projects that are ever more geographically dispersed on the global landscape.

This tendency is assisted by the technological scene by devices and applications that facilitate communication, co-operation and access to high volumes of data.

These days with tighter control of budgets and “do more with less”, efficiency and efficacy are the key factors of success, a direction indicated by Michael Hanford, vice-president of Gartner Research in his seminar Project Management in 2020 in which it stood out the development of the function of IT project management was moving from the software delivery to the transformation of the business.

One inevitable consequence of any project is change, so that good management of the impact and expectations of the business and of all the interested parties is key to increasing in a significant way the perceived value. Once more, it makes sense that all the managers of the business form part of the change, and who better to drive this than the Project Manager.

The success of the project depends on the talents of the team and the Project Manager, as shown by the analysis of the data by PMI Pulse that shows that the high performance organizations that have developed practice in project, schedule and budget management have achieved a more than two and a half fold increase in met business goals (89% against 34%), whilst at the same time investing 13 times less [i].

The Project Manager, with specific management skills like linear thinking and cascade planning is evolving towards a model of dynamic value creation through the transformation of the business and the reduction of complexity, where “I have some new software [SW])” moves on to the next level and the solution is based on significant changes in the business model [ii].

The Necessity for and the Current Situation of Project Management

Autor: Hugo Ascacíbar 
Change Manager at Grupo Santander, PMP®

Today, faced with such a competitive and dynamic economic landscape, organizations are encountering many new challenges. They are driven by constant change which, in turn, is accelerated by both environmental and economic forces. Technological, political, legislative, demographic and cultural forces are creating new opportunities for organizations that must continually adapt to thrive.
As can be seen from the latest report by Gartner, there is expected to be a growth in high-profit services during the next 5 to 10 years, in areas related to the connectivity of; homes, machines, digital security and the use of Big Data.

Diagram 1. Prediction of the growth of services in the digital economy. Source: Gartner

Oposiciones a Team Member

En los años 70, Larry Constantine, uno de los padres de la Ingeniería del Software, en un trabajo de consultoría para una grupo de empresas, aconsejó que las personas de nivel bajo en la jerarquía tuvieran alguna voz en los procesos de selección. La implementación de esta idea consistió en publicar un tablón de anuncios interno con los nuevos proyectos. Las personas de la empresa podrían ofrecerse en grupo para participar en dichos proyectos.

Si alguien quería trabajar con algunos de sus compañeros, compilaban un documento con los CVs y así se ofrecían como grupo. Había que indicar claramente la idoneidad de cada uno, cómo se complementaban unos con otros y por qué esta asignación no impactaría a otros proyectos de la empresa.