A Conversation With a Project Manager—10 Years in the Future

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   Leadership  

Greetings, 2022! I’m a project manager in 2032, and the good folk at ProjectManagement.com have asked me to tell you what life is like here in the future. So given how successful our recent time travel project was, I’m happy to oblige.

The good news is that ProjectManagement.com is still going strong; I spend a few minutes here every morning before I start my work. But I guess it’s that work you want to know about, isn’t it? Okay, here goes…

I always start my day reaching out to my team to see how things are going. We’re all remote of course, but with the latest collaboration software we can be virtually together as much as we need to be, either as the whole team or as smaller groups.

The biggest challenge for me is actually to just let the team get on with the work. They know what they’re doing, and they don’t need me interrupting them. I just find it difficult to not be there—I worry that I’m ignoring them, even though I can see their progress on tasks in real time on my screens, and the software will alert me if there are any problems.

The next thing I do is review the changes that have happened overnight. That might sound a bit odd for you folks back in 2022, so let me explain. Because we’re all remote, we’re working pretty much 24 hours a day with people in different time zones and …

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