The Future Project Manager?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Communications Management  

At the risk of stating the obvious, technology has moved forward dramatically in the last several years--tablets are projected to outsell laptops within the next two or three years and smartphones are now capable of doing virtually anything, anywhere. The workplace is increasingly being populated with a generation who grew up with smartphones--and for whom the traditional office approach is an antiquated anachronism.

Project management has been a little slower to embrace the technology advancements, in part because it is still a very process-driven profession, and processes are always slower to change than technology. There has been a rapid expansion in the use of collaboration tools, in the ability to generate more detailed and timely reports, and to simplify the calculation of metrics such as EVM (although processes have still held back the dramatic growth in the use of these measures). However, the fundamentals of project management--task assignment, schedule management, issue tracking, etc.--have remained a steadfastly people-driven set of disciplines. That’s going to change, and it calls into question the future of project managers.

Technology drives “self-management”
The growth of technology within project management is inevitable. More and more organizations are looking to do more with fewer resources, and they are looking to streamline …

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