Andy Jordan
President of Roffensian Consulting
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras based management consulting firm with a strong emphasis on organizational transformation, portfolio management and PMOs. Andy is an in-demand keynote speaker and author who delivers thought provoking content in an engaging and entertaining style, and is also an instructor in project management related disciplines including PMO and portfolio management courses on LinkedIn Learning.
What does the future of project management look like? While none of us can know, some clues can guide us. Over the last few decades, the project management role has evolved from a task-focused administrator to a leader of people. This is partly due to the popularity of Agile and related disciplines that require a different way of working. The result is a result of advancements in technology.
Technology has dramatically reduced the time project managers need to spend on administration, automating many tasks, managing workflows, and providing improved reporting and analytics. As a result, the importance of effective leadership in project management has increased. Project managers are now people leaders, building and motivating their teams to perform while creating an environment where people feel empowered.
The future – evolution, not revolution
Project management will continue this evolution towards a people-focused discipline for the foreseeable future, with management and administrative tasks becoming even more automated. The current significant trends are AI and project management, but that will not result in the fundamental redefining of project delivery that some imagine.
Leveraging generative AI for project management will be a skill all PMs must learn. However, for the next few years, AI will be limited to further streamlining administrative tasks and creating baselines for further human analysis. For example, AI may be asked to produce initial risk lists and assessments, estimate effort, or structure a schedule. These functions reduce the administrative workload of a project manager, but they will all still require manual review and adjustment.
In other use cases, AI can provide improved reporting with greater insight and analytics to bolster human effectiveness and efficiency. AI will help project managers identify problems more quickly and develop appropriate responses with a higher degree of success. Nonetheless, the project managers and their teams must take those actions.
Even in the longer term, five to more years out, AI will only develop into a trusted team member. It will never be a replacement for a project manager. But that doesn’t mean those project managers won’t have to adapt in other ways.
Broadening the role
Project managers’ leadership qualities always focus on people. The ability to bring a group of people from different backgrounds and work areas together to form a cohesive team has been the priority. As the role of a project manager as a leader expands, they are also increasingly expected to be business leaders.
Project managers are expected not just to deliver a complete solution accepted by customers but also a solution that can provide the goals and objectives of the business. They are expected to make decisions that maximize the ability to deliver business outcomes, even if that means compromising budgets, timelines, and functionality.
They won’t be doing this alone. Stakeholders, mainly the sponsor, will be heavily involved – as has always been the case. But, project managers will be expected to take on much more of a partner role, collaborating with those stakeholders rather than simply being guided by them.
This adjustment will require a greater understanding of business drivers, the strategic vision of their employer, and the relationship between their work and the enterprise’s success. While this level of awareness has improved over the past few years, there will still represent a need for many project managers to enhance their knowledge and understanding.
The bottom line
The role of project manager and project management discipline has evolved over the last 20 years and will continue to grow. That change will be driven in part by technology, in particular, AI in the project management arena, and in part by the evolving needs of organizations to align projects with business objectives.
Although project managers will need to embrace these changes, the future of project management remains bright, and it will be a critical part of the success of work delivery and overall enterprise performance.
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