Global cultural, physical, economic, and political events are rapidly and constantly transforming project management, setting new benchmarks, and shaping new trends. The business landscape is in constant transition forcing businesses to adapt quickly to stay relevant.
Acknowledging such rapid changes in the industry businesses today are more inclined towards professional project management consulting in Australia than ever before. In the light of the immediate need for enhancing communication and catching the pace of agile business models, project managers are challenged to anticipate future trends and act proactively to ensure a smooth sail.
Here are some major predictions for project management trends for the year that will assist you to proliferate your productivity and generate rapid returns on investments.
- Handling remote project teams
The coronavirus pandemic pushed all project teams to their homes and members working from home. Even as the world is recovering, most teams are still working from home, partially or fully. Clearly, managing projects is no more confined to a typical office setting.
Despite its challenges like lack of face-to-face interactions and human connections, WFH offers several advantages. It is providing an opportunity for the management to acquire and retain talents. Technology plays a crucial role in project management by bringing the team together and establishing effective communication.
- Increased inclusion of tools for project management
Project management was always an imperative part of setting business goals and managing risks. Expanding its range, today, project management also includes defining businesses strategies and encapsulates management of various tasks involved in implementing those strategies.
Project management tools work in integration and impact every aspect of business operations Businesses’ dependencies on these tools are likely to increase shortly as they assist in critical decision making and deliver tangible progress and value.
- Stress on improving collaboration
Project management has moved way ahead of the complex exchange of emails back and forth. It is heading towards a new era of extensive use of tools for communication and collaboration between team members.
Working with a distributed team provides liberty to the members who deliver better outputs to the employers. To extract maximum benefits of this new working model, project managers use various tools from dedicated project management systems to multimedia conferencing to ensure team collaboration.
- More importance to soft skills
Project management has a lot to do with managing people. From team members to clients managers have to deal with several stakeholders at different levels. This calls for a well-balanced combination of technical and soft skills, especially communication.
Given the present times, project managers have to acquire, and active practice soft skills like effective communication, empathy, rapid decision making, and several aspects of leadership.
- Focus on avoiding stress for team members
One thing that the pandemic has taught the entire world is more self-appreciation. Enlightened with that, employees prefer a workspace that allows them to self-care along with professional opportunities.
Along with employee retention, employee development has also become crucial for project managers. They have to quickly train the new entrants, help them settle in easily, and delegate work to them in a way to ensure avoiding mental and physical stress on the team. Considering the health, contentment, and happiness of the team members is now also a responsibility of project managers.
