Digital Age: What Challenges Await Project Managers?

Jiju ‘Jay’ Nair is a Senior Manager with Fannie Mae driving Cloud Transformation and adoption. He is an avid advocate for using innovative project and process management principles for building reliable and sustainable products.

  Career Development   Leadership   Organizational Project Management   Talent Management  

In the new brave world of digital startups causing market disruption and driving phenomenal growth, it’s no secret that project managers are looked to for providing situational leadership and guidance in steering the ship in the right direction. Young project management practitioners—who are relatively new to the profession and started their career during this exciting new age of landscape-shattering business paradigms and technology innovations—hold the key to the next phase of successful project management for organizations globally.

New age organizations like Uber, AirBnB, Google and Amazon are continuously challenging existing project management approaches and driving practitioners to closely align with their dynamic business goals and desires. It also needs to be noted that not all these organizations always favor a hierarchical structure that would put the project manager in the driving seat.

The world heard the story a few years back when Google experimented with self-driving project teams that had minimal to no management oversight. After a few iterations, Google leadership found that skilled project managers can indeed make projects successful in all aspects. However, the takeaway from such an experiment is that project management approaches as well as project managers should continuously evolve if they need to be relevant and contribute to the …

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