Our Digital PM Future

Mike Griffiths is an experienced project manager, author and consultant who works for PMI as a subject matter expert. Before joining PMI, Mike consulted and managed innovation and technology projects throughout Europe, North and South America for 30+ years. He was co-lead for the PMBOK Guide—Seventh Edition, lead for the Agile Practice Guide, and contributor to the PMI-ACP and PMP exam content outlines. Outside of PMI, Mike maintains the websites www.LeadingAnswers.com about leading teams and www.PMillustrated.com, which teaches project management for visual learners.

  Estimating   Innovation  

We live in a period of overlapping technology eras. At home, we have affordable smart speakers that we can talk to about local, real-time weather forecasts. Yet at work, we have printed project management books written for every type of project management anyone might encounter. Where is the industry-specific, project type-specific and project size-specific tailored guidance we need?

I hope our digital future will fix the mismatch. If I am running projects in the retail software sector, I don’t expect my practices to overlap much with those working in construction, medicine or marine biology. Up at the principle level, we all want successful projects, happy stakeholders and engaged teams. The principles behind effective planning and risk management are the same. However, down at the practice and “how-to” level, I want tailored guidance and concrete examples from, say, three similar projects to look at.

The good news is that we have the technology to build this—and so much more. Filtering documents based on tags is basic 20^th century functionality. Organizations could already filter and sort all of their project artifacts for easy retrieval.

The most common reason they do not is the infrastructure work to do this. No big payback appears for making the investment in a project to classify all project documents, just an incremental savings for every…

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