While project managers traditionally love structure, they now have to manage and lead the "raging tornado of change" that characterises the current era of digitisation and transformation, according to Lionel Moyal, Microsoft SA's Office Business Group Lead.
Speaking at the 9th biennial PMSA Conference in Johannesburg last month, he said successful delivery of projects was no longer enough. Leading change was the key challenge facing today's project managers.
"Digital transformation - the blurring of the physical and the digital divide - is the next industrial revolution. Business is changing and new business models are evolving," he said.
The way in which companies made decisions around digital transformation would affect their survival, he said. Generally, they followed one of four approaches to decision-making:
1. Economic decisions. This was the very traditional way of making decisions with cost being key to the decision made.
2. Survival. They had already been disrupted and were looking for a way to survive.
3. Experimentation. They were evaluating what disruption could mean but were not taking it seriously.
4. Strategic investment. They had recognised the need to change and to invest in the future by launching projects that would herald fundamental change.
"All these projects - of different kinds - exist in organisations all the time - the problem is that execution remains a challenge," he said, noting that barely 33% of projects are delivered on budget and just 29% on time; only 35% deliver on their objectives; and just 58% are in line with company strategy.
"So it cannot be business as usual. It's time to redefine the way people work to deliver a project. It's up to the project manager to define the rules and the way things are done because everything in the organisation is a project," he added.
Project managers, he continued, should use technology as an enabler, but should not allow technology to subsume them.
To become more effective, project managers needed to use the right tools that enable collaboration: cloud-based technologies that enable productive, engaged and connected teams; social tools that could be used to foster collaboration and sharing; intelligent tools that understand context in order to prioritise what matters most; and move away from tools that required the user to learn how they work to natural tools that learn the user's way of working.
"For productivity in project management, teams need to work smarter and share information; learn to communicate clearly in ways that are easy to understand; leverage social networks; use technology to automate routine tasks; and use data to gain insights that would drive decision-making," he concluded.
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