Digital Lean

The Future of Project Management in the Digital Age

I am tempted to conclude that project management is on the decline. There is saturation in the number of project managers, in the activities called projects, in the number of projects managed by professional project managers, and many other metrics used to measure the effectiveness of project management discipline. It seems that this practice , as designed and used more than 15 years ago needs to redefine itself to be able to produce strategic advantage in the era of digital transformation.

If it is so, what other methods and concepts should business companies use to execute the work in an efficient manner? And also, what should the project managers do?

To answer these questions, we need first to remember how project management achieved such a high visibility and popularity in the last 15 years. Recall that this was the time of big investments in IT infrastructure and in-house developped IT applications. These investments required very strict scope management, time scheduling, resource deployment and cost management skills to make sure the company resources are used wisely.

But nowadays, the data is moving onto the cloud platform, and business value is created by using readily available APIs from an external ecosystem to make our business and application experiments. And it seems we don’t need project managers for that.

Let me then outline some advice on how to navigate through this new digital world without traditional project management.
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