Taking over the world

The Project Management Institute (PMI) was founded over dinner at a restaurant in Philadelphia in 1969. By the end of the meal, the three dining companions had agreed that a new organisation was needed to provide a means for project managers working in industry to share information and discuss common problems.

They were right. Today, PMI has more than 470,000 members from 207 countries and territories, served by 283 chartered chapters run by more than 10,000 volunteers. Ireland's chapter was chartered in 1998 and today has 1,300 members, up from 1,000 two years ago when current PMI Ireland president Niall Murphy took up the role.

One of the drivers behind its growth globally is increased recognition of the value good project managers can bring to any organisation.

"A project by its nature is something temporary. It has a beginning and an end, and it produces an output, be that a product, a service or a change," says Murphy, whose day job is as a software development manager for Oracle Corp.

“Having project management is seen as a way of protecting that investment. Any savings you gain as a result of the efficiency and organisation that comes with it is money that goes straight to the bottom line. But it is not only about saving money or minimising costs, it is about getting the best bang for your buck.”

Growing appreciation of this fact is due in no small part to the increased professionalisation of its practitioners. "It's a discipline that has been around for some time however, in the past the thinking was pretty much 'I'm a project manager because I'm managing a project'. A lot of people were project-managing but without having any technical grounding in it, and the methodology itself was immature," says Féilim Harvey, partner, Project Portfolio Management at PwC.

A rise in professional development courses, both on and offline, and the promotion of education and skills by organisations such as PMI, has changed this. “Over the past 15 years, we started to see a groundswell of people with project-management skills delivering projects on time, on cost and on quality.”

Right now, however, the profession is undergoing a further iteration. “The next evolution in project management is a much stronger focus on outcomes and benefits,” says Harvey.

Part of this requires the project manager to continually assess if a project’s initial objectives hold true over time.

“If you take the construction crisis of 2007, for example, you might well have built a housing estate on time, on cost and to the required quality. But there’s every chance it would have remained unsold and turned into a ghost estate,” says Harvey.

For a really successful outcome, project mangers are now expected to ensure the ultimate outcome hits an organisation’s strategic target too.

This represents more of a change than you might think. As part of his remit as a lecturer in project management, Harvey routinely asks his students a question to demonstrate this fact. “I ask if any of them have ever worked on a project that trucked along even when they, as project managers, knew there was no point, and two thirds will typically say yes,” he says.

The trend to empower project managers to ensure that a project is strategically aligned with an organisation’s strategy should eradicate such waste. And it becomes an even more important facet of their role in a world increasingly characterised by disruption and uncertainty.

“Historically, an organisation had a lot more certainty, whether in relation to things like planning or building models or regulations. Now, they do not. In the last while, we have had unprecedented levels of uncertainty, and of course Brexit is bringing even more. Project management has to be more agile as a result, adapt its methodologies to cope, and react to change.”

Investment

This increased need for good project management is not a cost but an investment. “Inevitably, you get a very strong return on that investment and your risks will be reduced. It’s a false economy not to invest in project management,” he says.

As managing director of Turlon & Associates, a project, programme and process training and consultancy service provider, with offices in Philadelphia and Dublin, Liam Dillon is also well-placed to see global trends in the field.

He spends 30 per cent of his time in the Middle East too. “If you were to go back even 10 years, you’d see that project management was much more around process and structure, that there was a rigidity to the discipline. Now it is much more about being agile and being lean, and being more focused on the end delivery than on the process of that delivery,” says Dillon.

It’s about tackling even large-scale projects on the basis of focusing on the next nearest deliverable.

“If you’re spending €200 million on a project, it’s not how you do it, it’s the end result that counts. Organisations are becoming more lean and are asking themselves, how do we get more bang for our buck. They are giving people the wherewithal to do more and to move quickly, rather than spending too much time doing the documentation.”

Being able to drive a project in such an agile and fast-changing environment requires additional skills and around the world demand is growing for project managers that can combine the key technical skills of the discipline with emotional intelligence.

“It includes a range of skills such as the ability to manage conflict, to listen and to deliver bad news if required,” he says. Today’s project manager has to “talk the talk too, be technically competent as well as business competent”.

Want to know the secret to successful projects? Agility

An agile organisation is one that can respond quickly to changes, be they opportunities or threats.

New research from PMI globally has found that organisational agility increases project success rates. It also found that organisations with higher levels of agility place a significant focus on building diverse skill sets and process capabilities.

Revenue growth was found to be greater too. According to its research, 75 per cent of organisations with high agility reported a minimum of 5 per cent year-on-year growth last year, compared to just 29 per cent of organisations with low agility.

"Each day, organisations face heightened competition and ongoing disruptions from new technology, market shifts and social change," says Mark A Langley, chief executive of the global PMI. "Given these challenges, it did not surprise us to find that a large majority of organisations indicated greater agility over the last five years. In today's market, successful organisations must be able to react and adapt to unexpected roadblocks and market changes. Organisations with high agility can switch priorities quickly without losing momentum."