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Future of Project Management

This category contains topics associated with the impact of Agile on the future of project management.  Agile is having a huge impact on the project management profession that will cause us to fundamentally rethink and redefine what “project management” is and that will have a big impact on the careers of many project managers.

To continue to grow and thrive in this new environment, it is essential that project managers understand this impact and develop new skills and new ways of thinking as necessary to continue to develop their career direction.  The gist of these changes is:

  • For many years, the only way to do project management was a traditional, plan-driven approach that put an emphasis on planning and control to deliver projects with well-defined requirements on schedule and under budget.
  • That approach has some obvious limitations when you attempt to apply it to a highly uncertain environment where some level of flexibility and adaptivity is needed.  It also doesn’t work well in a very competitive business environment where some level of creativity and innovation may be important.

This is not a binary choice and mutually-exclusive choice between these two approaches as some people seem to think.  In many situations, project managers need to understand how to blend Agile and traditional plan-driven project management in the right proportions to fit the situation.  Any project manager who only knows how to do traditional plan-driven project management and tries to force-fit all projects to that approach will have difficulty in this new environment.

This situation is made even more difficult by the fact that a formal role for a project manager is not defined at all in an Agile environment; and, at the team level, many functions that might normally be performed by a project manager have been distributed among other members of the team.

Please check the articles associated with this category for more detail:

What’s the Value of Project Management?

What is the Impact of Agile?

I frequently get questions from students and others asking “What’s the value of project management?”. That’s a very good question because the world of project management is changing rapidly as a result of the influence of Agile. As a result, the answer to that question is not as simple as you might think. It’s important […]

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What Is the Future of Project Management? What is the Impact of Agile?

What is the Impact of Agile?

Background PMBOK version 6 and the new PMI Agile Practice Guide signal a new direction for the future of project management. For the first time, PMI has started to integrate Agile and traditional plan-driven project management. What does that mean for the future of project management? What’s the Impact? I’ve written a number of articles

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Why Is Agile Important to Project Managers?

Future of Agile Project Management

I think a lot of people are confused about “What is ‘Agile’” and the importance of Agile to project managers: The word “Agile” has many different connotations Many project managers think that it is something that only applies to software development and doesn’t apply to them at all. For more detail on that, here’s an

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Is Project Management Obsolete?

Is the Idea of a PMO Obsolete?

What’s the future of project management? Is project management obsolete?  I don’t think that “project management” is obsolete. However, I do think that some traditional roles of a “Project Manager” are becoming obsolete in projects that require a more adaptive approach I also think that there’s a need to redefine what “project management” is if

Is Project Management Obsolete? Read More »

The Evolution of Agile Project Management

Future of Agile Project Management

There is a lot of confusion about the evolution of Agile Project Management. It’s very clear that we are on the verge of the “Next Generation of the Project Management” profession. Its not completely clear how it will evolve but there is a lot we can learn from similar evolution’s in other professions. The Project

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What Project Management Certification Should I Get?

How to Prepare for PMI-ACP Certification

I’ve gotten lots of questions from students in my Agile Project Management training along the lines of “What certification should I get?”. It’s understandable that there’s a lot of confusion about this because there is so much change going on in this area. As a result, it can be somewhat of a moving target to

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What Is the Next Generation of Project Management?

Future of Agile Project Management

Background What is the next generation of project management? What is the impact of Agile on the future of project management? What Is the Next Generation of Project Management? In order to understand this future direction, we first need to understand the impact that Agile is having on the project management profession. Here’s an article

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