How the Project Manager’s Role is Evolving with Digital By Navjot Singh

Technology trends are converging. Accelerating development, collaboration, speeding adoption, and inspiring innovation are adding to the fast pace of change in all industries. This pace of change is often affected when a technological innovation gathers critical mass in terms of distribution base, acceptances, and capability. For every technology there's a need and with every need is a human, and because of this, 2019 will be the year of the human in digital project management. Why? Because technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are going to make a great impact on a project manager's job. The important thing to note here is that technology is not going to replace project managers, but is there to make their work easier. 

DATA INSIGHTS FOR BETTER DECISION MAKING

As a digital project manager, have you considered how you could use powerful and accurate near-time data analysis to understand your clients better? Data science drives a lot of better decision making, if your data scientists are able to communicate meritoriously with the rest of the business. It means ensuring that project managers listen to their data scientists and analysts and come up with actionable insights. For digital project managers, data enabled tasks will help them to prioritise projects and allocate resources for creating new work. By enabling technology, project managers can have access to historical data spanning different departments or industries in a matter of minutes rather than weeks or months. Here are two key ways technology can help project managers: 

BECOME MORE EFFICIENT 

Insert responsibility closest to the problem, and remove bottlenecks. By knowing exactly what is being produced and how much waste is created in a project, businesses can build a more efficient delivery processes that results in a lower number of defects. By observing any behavioral patterns driven from the data, project managers can easily fix issues or allocate them to the correct person. 

BECOME MORE EFFECTIVE 

Having access to correct data can allow project managers to focus more on necessary and actual project management, and less time spent unnecessary troubleshooting. This leads to effective processes across a business, including automation of problem solving, and reduced complexity by making everything easier to manage. 

EXPRESS INNOVATION USING TOMORROW'S TECHNOLOGIES 

Many areas of technology are reaching such a critical mass and progressively this convergence is driving greater and more rapid impact in this industry. The rate of growth in new trends that are building on each other is significant, and interfaces that were easy to use are becoming more intuitive. Customer engagement is crucial and this is why believe that 2019 will be the year of having a customer-centric perspective in project management.

WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN?

The digital project manager's job is constantly evolving 

The emergence of new trends and disruption is increasing

Project managers who don't evolve risk falling behind