The human side of Project Management

Let’s be visionary for a while. Let us and imagine what we will have to say about the definition of work in five years time.

Work is not about “getting things done”. Today, it is increasingly becoming rather a set of performed tasks, under different legal, functional, and geographic frameworks. Tasks are being broken down into projects that may either be outsourced to independent professionals and experts.  They are often reconfigured into projects that assemble of physical or virtual teams across borders and time-zones.

The project-focused approach is on the place now

How does this work in practice? Once a specific project, product, or assignment is identified,

a team of different people from different professions, with distinct, but complementary skills come together and collaborate to get it done. Once the team finishes the project, it is disassembled and re-configured with other members on another project.

By working on projects in an international environment, we see that work executed by teams, composed of individuals of different skills, has a global impact and in a result joins societies together.

In today’s work, the individual is in the centre of attention

While some workers already are equipped with tools and methods to adapt to coming “projectification”, not all of them are equipped with this knowledge, skills, and abilities to be able to respond to changes that work on projects brings.

Given the changes in the workplace, people have to increasingly learn new skills to remain employable throughout their working life. Skills continue to be the best guarantor of social mobility and opportunity. The expertise of individuals is not static and needs to be updated and fine-tuned as new challenges are coming.

At the same time, work-life balance preferences are changing. Youngsters are keen to have more diversity and also more flexibility in their work patterns and commitments. They can work on several projects in parallel, but once they finish the job, they require a decent level of rest and relax.

What regards the work dynamic, the pace of change has accelerated significantly, mainly due to digital technologies. As automation and artificial intelligence are leaping into new areas, the human-robot partnership is transforming the nature of work.

Finally, one does not have to be a visionary to see those changes in the work environment. They are already here. We recognize that “teams of tomorrow” have increasingly varied types of workers with different sets of skills.

The right questions we should ask ourselves now are: Are we ready to be a competent member of Teams of tomorrow? Do people in our companies have the right competencies for tomorrow? How to develop and find Project managers that are ready for work of tomorrow?

Come to find answers during the 2020 SENET conference, taking place from 17.5.2020 – 19.5.2020 in Bratislava. Register at: www.senet2020.org