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Date
Two influential companies in PM have come together – IPS Learning and ESI International, to form TwentyEighty. They have issued their Top Ten Project Management Trends for 2016. When these trends are released, we are always eager to see if the concepts of sustainability thinking make it into the list of trends, either directly and literally, or through a second-order connection.
This year, the trends were, unfortunately completely absent of the word sustainability.
However, the theme is there. You just have to know where to look. And we do.
Let’s have a look at a couple of the trends and how we connect the dots properly to align them with sustainability in project management.
Trend 2: Broadening Strategic Role of the Project Manager. In this trend, the authors correctly assert that “PMs are being asked to think more strategically”. They also say “they are evolving from project managers to profit managers”. So far, it’s not about sustainability. They come so, so close to getting it right when they say, “Project management is no longer just about managing the triple constraints, but rather about reaching solutions faster and demonstrating strong, direct business impact. We agree – PM is no longer (only) about the triple constraint, but the ‘other’, added constraints involve a triple bottom line (social, economic and ecological) not just a ‘business impact’. Unless, of course, the ‘business impact’ to which they refer, itself already includes the holistic impact of the triple bottom line. We assert that when it comes to thinking strategically, that means linking vision and mission to operations – and that in turn mandates a holistic style of thinking (and constraint identification as well as opportunity discovery) which considers the social and the environmental as well as the financial. And this isn’t necessarily about whales, trees, and bees – when we say environment, we also include the local project environment – see my video about how the Big Dig project neglected the Boston environment of salt and snow, which could have cost lives but did cost $54M in repairs to light fixtures in the tunnels under the city.
In Trend 2, TwentyEighty goes on to say, “PMs are moving away from their historical position within the organization as a technical cost center and toward a more pivotal role charged with ensuring that project-based work aligns to, and helps achieve, the organization’s strategic intent. Smart organizations are hiring, retaining, and training their PMs for the skills necessary to manage this evolving role”. Well, yes, it is definitely about evolution of the PM, and we fully agree that the project manager is at the key pivot point between strategy and operations. The piece they left out, however, is the “pivot”, the change agent role played by the PM can and should involve the significant move that companies have made in including social and ecological elements in their mission statements – the so-called Purpose element, as mentioned so eloquently in the book by that name (Purpose – The Starting Point of Great Companies) by Nikos Mourkogiannis).
We will continue to “bend the trends” – focusing them on long-term thinking, expanding them to cover triple-bottom-line considerations, enabling them to make all of us truly better project, program, and portfolio managers.
And, speaking of program and portfolios, in Part 2 of Bend the Trends, we will cover Trend 7 – The Significance of Portfolio and Program Management.
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: March 07, 2016 10:50 PM |
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