Top 8 Project Management Trends of 2022
It goes without saying that project management has undergone some big changes in recent years. While some of those changes will remain, there are also other new trends on the rise. For project management professionals, keeping up to date with trends is one of the critical ways you can stay ahead and reap the most benefits. With that in mind, here’s a quick list of the Top 8 Project Management Trends of 2022.
1. Remote and hybrid work is here to stay
A Global Trends in Project Management report shows that 58% of project teams work remotely. A further 86% work from multiple locations. The popularity of remote and hybrid work isn’t a surprise. Surveys suggest that working from home has resulting in a significant increase in job satisfaction and productivity.
But hybrid configurations are not all rainbows and sunshine. Many employees have cited a lack of social interaction, less work-life separation, and communication and collaboration barriers as challenges of remote work.
Hybrid work and teams are becoming the new norm. Therefore, organisations will need to reconfigure to manage their teams in this new context, and ensure they are working as effectively as possible.
2. Enhancing communication and collaboration is critical
Our communication and collaboration tools and software has come a long way. As a result, we have experienced rapid innovation and growth during the context of the recent pandemic. In recent years, there has been a focus on adapting software and tools out of necessity. However, organisations can now focus on enhancing their communication tools to improve productivity in our hybrid and agile environment.
As a result, organisations are no longer haphazardly using different conferencing, project planning, and productivity applications. Instead, organisations are turning to integrative and holistic project management software. This allows organisations to consolidate their communication and collaboration activities onto a single platform.
Whether you use off-the-shelf software, or a custom solution like pmo365, we are all still learning how to work smoothly in our increasingly digital world. As remote and hybrid work continues as normal, continual enhancement in communication will be a critical tool to success.
3. Increasing dependency on project management tools
With a greater need for collaboration and communication comes a greater dependency on the tools that enable them. However, reports show that many employees experience ‘app fatigue’, or are being overwhelmed by the number of tools they use on a daily basis. The consolidation of these apps, often into a singular project management tool or software, has become highly valuable for organisations.
Effective project management tools are able to handle a wide range of activities, including resource management, schedule management, and portfolio management. By consolidating all project-related activities onto a single platform, organisations are able to extract valuable data and insights.
As project management tools and software become an organisation’s single source of truth, the dependency upon them grows significantly. That is why it is important to make sure you choose the right project management tool for your organisation unique needs.
4. Cloud-based in the new standard
With hybrid working here to stay, you need a cloud based solution to unify the work of your geographically dispersed team. Being able to access your data any time at any place is simply a necessity.
Prior to the pandemic, many resisted shifting to the cloud due to concerns regarding reliability, security, and cost-efficiency. Since then, however, organisations have learned how valuable cloud-based solutions are to work effectively in our ever-changing world.
However, cloud-based solutions are not completely foolproof. Make sure that your project management solutions are built on secure data centres to prevent any potential data loss. pmo365 builds all its solutions on Microsoft Azure data centres that have to achieve IRAP certification. The Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) certifies platforms that have the highest standard of cyber and data security and it is used to maximise the security of the likes of the Australian federal and state government.
5. Elevating different soft skills
As a result of AI and smart tools, project managers can focus on value-adding activities such as team development and leadership. All of these activities are built upon strong foundational soft skills like communication and adaptability. Consider introducing new programs made to expand global leadership capabilities with emphasis on empathy and creativity training. For a future-proof project team, make sure to invest some time and resources into building your team’s soft skills.
Read more: Top 5 Soft Skills You Need to be the best PMO leader
6. Mental and physical health has entered the conversation
Burnout has been cited as one of the key contributors to the Great Resignation. Over the pandemic, many employees have taken on greater workloads, leading to decreasing mental and physical health. As organisations try to retain their existing talent, many will need to change their current practices and cultures. Organisations are placing added emphasis on improving employee health, satisfaction, and, by extension, productivity.
Some ways you can improve your team’s health is by setting clear expectations, goals and deadlines, offering schedule flexibility, and including fitness benefits. You can also apply more compassionate and empathy-based leadership styles.
7. AI continues to drive efficiency through automation
Artificial Intelligence is set to have incredible impacts on the sphere of project management. However, only now are many organisations finally tapping into the full capabilities of AI.
Artificial intelligence will bring significant changes to project management, some of these changes you may already have witnessed. From virtual robots, to automated monitoring and reporting, AI will enable project managers to make better decisions faster. This will achieve overall greater efficiency throughout organisations worldwide.
Read more: AI in Project Management: 8 Real Changes AI will bring to Project Management
For some, AI may be an exciting but intimidating concept to understand, let alone fully embrace. To help you get ahead of the curve, we’ve made a guide to help you prepare. Make sure to read more here.
8. Sustainability and Social Responsibility will become more prominent
Just like artificial intelligence, sustainability and social responsibility isn’t a new topic. However, the pandemic has also brought sustainability further in public prominence. As a result, organisations are beginning to truly grasp the value of more holistic project success. Thus, there has been an increased emphasis on considering the planet and people, along with profits.
As customers become socially and environmentally conscious, sustainability practices will play a critical role in differentiating your organisations from competitors.
But simply grafting sustainability measures into your pre-existing project management processes may not cut it. In worst case scenarios, improper measures can even land organisations in hot water from accusations of greenwashing. Therefore, it’s worth utilising different methodologies and standards, such as PRiSM and the P5 Standards for Sustainability in Project Management, to ensure your organisation is are checking all the boxes.
Read more: Sustainable Project Management Explained
Stay Ahead of Project Management Trends with pmo365
The project management field moves fast. So, it’s critical to keep up to date with the latest trends and innovations to successful project management professional. At pmo365, we are always looking ways to tap into trends, and help our clients get the best service and tools the market can offer.
Talk to our PPM experts today to see how we can take your project management activities to the next level!
IIR: Introduce, Integrate, Replace
Step 01
Introduce
You cannot run a portfolio on Excel and PowerPoint alone.
Project portfolio management is the discipline of seeing every project in one place, prioritising the work that matters, allocating people against demand, and governing delivery with real numbers. It is not optional at any serious scale. The moment you have more projects than one person can hold in their head, you need a single, current view of status, schedule, cost, resource and risk.
Excel and PowerPoint feel free because there is no licence conversation. The real cost is elsewhere. It is the hours spent maintaining workbooks, the version confusion, and the numbers that go stale the moment they are pasted.
A spreadsheet cannot tell you, on demand, which projects are at risk, where your people are over-committed next quarter, or how much of the portfolio budget is actually spent.
Introducing a proper PPM platform is the first step. Not to add another tool for its own sake, but to give the portfolio one place where the data lives together and stays live.
Step 02
Integrate
The instinct after buying a PPM platform is to make everyone move into it. That is the fastest way to fail. Project managers already have tools they trust, and finance already has systems of record. Force a migration on day one and you get resistance, shadow spreadsheets, and a dataset nobody believes.
Integrate first. Meet the data where it already is. Two directions matter.
Direction 01
Enterprise systems
Connect to the finance or ERP layer so actuals, commitments and budgets flow in automatically. Reporting stops being a monthly reconciliation and becomes a live view. Nobody rekeys a spend figure again.
Direction 02
The tools PMs already use
The direction most platforms neglect, and arguably the more important. The portfolio should read from the PM's own tools, not force people to abandon them.
The reason this matters is simple. That data is already there, and it is kept current by the person closest to it. When the portfolio reads directly from these sources, the status report updates itself. No chasing, no copy and paste, no reporting lag. The PM keeps working the way they always have, and the board gets a live picture as a side effect.
Step 03
Replace
Integration buys you two things: trust, and live data. Once both are in place, you look at what can go.
Every organisation carries tools and spreadsheets that either do not do the job well or carry a heavy maintenance overhead. The classic example is the resource spreadsheet. It is a workbook someone maintains by hand to track who is on what. It is always slightly out of date, owned by one person, and impossible to reconcile against real demand.
Replace it with the equivalent function in your PPM.
A proper demand management capability does what the spreadsheet was reaching for, with none of the overhead. It models demand against capacity across the whole portfolio, updates as projects shift, and needs no manual upkeep.
Replace deliberately, one function at a time, and only after the platform has earned it. The test is simple: if a spreadsheet is high overhead or low quality, and the platform does the same job natively, retire the spreadsheet.
The payoff
You stop producing reports and start reading them
Follow IIR and the nature of reporting changes. The status view is current because it is fed by the tools people already use and the systems that already hold the money. The overhead that used to consume the last week of every month disappears, because there is nothing to assemble.
That is the whole point of real-time reporting. Not a prettier deck, but a portfolio you can look at any day of the month and trust, at a fraction of the effort it takes today.
Built on Microsoft 365. Native ground for IIR.
pmo365 integrates with the tools your teams already run in, so the path from Introduce to Integrate to Replace is a natural progression rather than a rip and replace.