The Connected Project Manager and the Connected Future

 

According to Gartner mankind will witness 20 billion internet-connected things by 2020. Whether it is

1. My apple watch scheduling an appointment with my health care provider based on my health statistics
2. My connected car calling the service centre for a proactive servicing
3. Me tracking my 11-year-old daughter’s brushing regime through the smart toothbrush, while I am away from home

this connectedness is increasing. The future is no doubt connected and it is here. This connectedness could be in the following forms:

Digital Twin – The connected product: A digital twin, according to Gartner, is a digital representation of a physical object. It includes the model of the physical object, live data from the object, a unique one-to-one correspondence to the object, and the ability to monitor the object.

Digital Thread – The connected asset life cycle management: The digital thread consists of a communication framework that helps in facilitating an integrated view and connected data flow of the asset’s data throughout its lifecycle

Social Internet of things – The connected ecosystem: The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) is defined where things can establish social relationships with other objects autonomously. This will lead to a network of things and humans talking to each other or exchanging data.

Does this connectedness affect the #futureofPMWork ?

How will the Project manager need to evolve to manage connected projects?

Enter the connected Project Manager with:

1. A connected mindset: In #futureofWork the project managers are drivers of innovation, change and culture. Since no project will ever exist in isolation, they are responsible for bringing in the connected mindset and systems thinking.
2. Focus on interoperability: The Project Manager will need to drive solutions that understand how the the things are to behave. This will help design engineers anticipate potential failure modes much more effectively, which in turn effects how they spec the instrumentation into the design. This means collaboration between end users, hardware, software, third party partners, service providers and the ecosystem.
3. Experimental, adaptable and innovative approach:  The build approach would be experimental, create prototypes, deploy the minimal viable product to production, monitor and collect performance and usage data. The usage data may be end user usage data or data emitted through interactions with other things in the connected ecosystem. Learn from the data gathered, generate insights, adapt, innovate not only to improve the current solution, but also existing solutions in the ecosystem to meet and exceed customer expectations, add value, and scale up to an entire ecosystem.

The value of connected projects lies beyond the connectivity – The Business Value! The Mantra for generating this value is “Start Small - Show, don’t tell -Learn and Adapt and Grow Big!”

Sounds like Agile ?

To learn more on why Agile is most suited for IoT projects read on

http://www.pmnetwork-digital.com/pmnetwork/september_2017/MobilePagedReplica.action?pm=1&folio=23#pg25

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_twin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_thread

http://www.social-iot.org/

Photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash