What Can We Learn from Digital PM?

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.

  Career Development   Innovation  

A few years ago, I started hearing a lot about digital project management, and to be honest, I initially dismissed it as just another trend. However, the voices around it kept getting louder, and people whose opinion I trust and respect started talking more about the concept. So I figured I needed to sit up and take notice. That’s really where the problems started, because I had a really tough time figuring out what the heck “digital project management” was.

It started out pretty simply: You find some articles, you read some material and you get a picture of how the concept differed from what I thought of as project management. I pretty quickly got the idea that digital project management was a term often used to describe the management of customer engagements (projects) in the online marketing and agency world.

I could understand that—online professional services initiatives, if you like. We’re all familiar with client projects in many types of professional services environments, so it makes sense that would be the alignment. The problem was the material I was reading didn’t sound much like a project manager to me. Here’s an example of the kind of thing I was finding (it’s from March 2013, so relatively early in the “mainstreaming” of digital PM, but it was by no means an outlier): http://blog.hubspot.com/agency…

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.