Project Management – Mindset Change

I recently published an article in a Chicago Tamil Sangam's newsletter in my native language, Tamil on the change in the mindset about project management. Based on requests received to see this message translated in English, I am posting this blog entry.

Once upon a time when someone didn’t get a job the people recommended those to get a computer engineering job. Similarly, the prevalent thought of project managers among today’s workforce is that these project managers can’t do anything other than updating tasks in the project plan. Although the experts familiar with project management profession can laugh and ignore these comments, these comments are regrettable when the experts think these comments deeply.

The Project Management Institute describes this profession suggesting that project managers should exhibit multifaceted skills to enter any industry. If you check out the responsibilities of the roles such as the healthcare software engineering, retail database administrator, or financial QA analyst on the Internet, do you think one can get these jobs without the required experience for that job? Even if one gets this job, can one continue to retain that job without keeping skills current? I am sure you know the answer.

Like these jobs, the project management profession also has been mandating the project managers to possess the specific domain knowledge and basic technical skills for a long time. Despite that, why do people feel the way expressed above about this profession? There may be many reasons for this. However, one important reason is the project manager’s lack of self-initiative! The resulting lack of attention to details leads to team members spending their time in unnecessary meetings, correcting customer complaints, and collecting required documents eroding trust and earning aversion on the project manager. These mixed feelings about the project managers manifest as a mocking smile at the project manager’s incompetency.

Analogous to the dialogue from the very popular Tamil movie, Parasakthi “Whether our voice is heard in heaven or not, it should be heard by the management,” the Project Management Institute also introduced several changes through the Talent Triangle. This requirement mandates the project manager to continuously improve their technical project management, strategic business management, and leadership skills potentially leading to the losing their certification when these skills are not maintained.

Many of you may be a project manager, member of a project team, hiring managers, or their friend or family. Your cooperation is also required to change this mindset about project management. If you are a project manager, begin to participate in the local chapter meetings and join advanced classes to improve your skills and competencies. If you know a project manager, create volunteer opportunities and encourage project managers to practice their skills. When such attempts lead to making the project managers better at their professional skills, you will also reap from the benefits of the projects managed successfully. So, let us stop feeding the earlier thoughts, think of what we can do and act on it!

Reference
Project Management - Mindset Change (2016, April). Palagai, 1, 8-9.

Future of Project Management in the Next few years

In the Professional Development Day (PD Day) conducted by Project Management Institute Mass Bay chapter on June 19, 2015, there was a great introductory session with more than 100+ participants representing many industries that broke into numerous tables. One of the questions that all the attendees worked on was the top challenges that are facing the field of project managers in the next 10 years.

Synthesizing the various thoughts from these discussions, the following set of challenges evolved where project managers should equip themselves with more knowledge.

1. Become more business- oriented learning strategic thinking
2. Having to work with remote multinational teams learning the cultural nuances
3. Become more involved with futuristic technologies on just enough automation, delegating even creative tasks to relieve human capacity, and learning new ways of doing things with mobile, service orientation, and security areas
4. Learning to work with multiple tools for both process and analytics bringing focus into application lifecycle management and total cost of ownership
5. Understanding agile framework as much as traditional project management framework learning to know when to apply each or a hybrid form
6. Learning to manage external and internal stakeholders in the business learning to negotiate better
7. Getting better at managing risks in multifaceted areas (PESTLE) besides just SWOT
8. Being more accountable for quality to compete with the agile thinking
9. Promoting project management in organizations much beyond PMP certification
10. Understanding the impact of growing regulatory environments on projects

These thoughts present insightful forecasting of what is to come both in the project managers that face the clients and the account managers (Ryals, 2012) that should exhibit project management thinking. So, the landscapes around the evaluation of project management competency are rising. For instance, the Project Management Institute is looking at PMI Talent Triangle (Know the details, n.d.) incorporating technical project management as integral component to continuing credit requirements. 

Similarly, Computerworld in an independent study (Pratt, 2014) forecasts the growth of project managers as part of IT skills emphasizing project managers to exhibit both business and technical acumen to oversee large enterprise projects, growth of security and compliance skills, demand for skills in the mobile application and device management and increase in the knowledge of big data analysis. 

So, competition is rising! How equipped are we in rising to this challenge stepping out of our comfort zone? One or two years from now if we come to read the same blog, what new skills by training and experience would we have gained?

References

Know the details (n.d.) Project Management Institute. Retrieved  from http://www.pmi.org/certification/ccr-updates/know-the-details.aspx

Pratt, M.K. (2014, Nov 18). 10 hottest IT skills.  Retrieved from http://www.computerworld.com/article/2844020/it-careers/10-hottest-it-skills-for-2015.html

Ryals, L. (2012, July 13). How to succeed at key account management. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2012/07/how-to-succeed-at-key-account/#sthash.0YH3ELKn.dpuf