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If you missed part 2 of the series, you can read 'What gap will emerging project managers fill in the discipline?' here.
One of the most interesting aspects of project management is what it might look like in the future. We know where it has come from – very much the ‘accidental’ project manager route, where technically competent people were then asked to manage teams in their assorted fields, with varying degrees of success (or more likely failure) realised. This has transitioned through the rigour of applied processes and frameworks (PRINCE2, PMBoK and others) to a space where project managers are very much formally trained and intentionally explore our discipline at the start of their careers rather than landing in it randomly.
There has also been a shift in leadership and management styles to lean slightly away from the ‘Alpha’ person holding authority over a team and ruling with an iron (triangle) fist to control the time, cost and quality. Now project managers are stretched in the most intangible ways, inspiring teams through living their values, providing emotional support and recognising the importance of their individuality within the group as a functional entity. That’s somewhat more abstract than shouting at a direct report because the project is over budget…
What lies ahead?
So what could come next? Gazing into my crystal ball, I see a small house in winter, pine trees adjacent, white landscape all around. Hold on, that’s a snow globe I’m looking at. It really isn’t easy to predict where the project management profession is heading, so suspend your disbelief for a moment while we go on a fantastical voyage of imagination.
One of my good friends is a ‘futurist’ – looking at trends that are likely to occur over the next few years. He has been reasonably successful at predicting things that become reality, and he pointed me in the direction of ‘Ready Player One’ (the book, not the film) when I asked him about the future of games, which I’m going to place next to project management as a metaphor. Despite being fiction, all signs point to an increasing virtual presence (virtual signalling…?) becoming our reality, not just in terms of recreation, but also in our everyday lives.
The virtual world and advancing artificial intelligence will have an impact on project management, without a doubt. At present, we are seeing training sessions and safety messages delivered by AI-generated figures, looking and sounding remarkably like real people. Perhaps this will evolve into all presentations being delivered by holograms, as the AI reads and interprets reports and data to provide insights that people struggle to convey or understand, especially when dealing with ‘big data’.
The dual intelligence of future project managers: EQ meets TQ
When project managers recently started talking openly about AI, it was centred around how it could take on all of the menial tasks that form part of our roles – wouldn’t it be great if the cost report could be compiled and issued by AI, or the schedule could be updated automatically, or the minutes taken by a virtual assistant? As the capability of AI starts to be better understood, it now seems like this would be a significant waste of the potential – so we need to ask ourselves hard questions about where we fit in with AI, rather than how it fits in with us.
All of this is to say that the project manager of the future will not only require emotional intelligence to deal with the humans they work with, but also technological intelligence to harness the power of AI to realise their joint potential. I don’t think that the dystopian future when the machines become sentient is on the horizon, nor the massive reduction in the workforce due to AI being able to do everything for us. What I do see is a world where we run projects to try and maximise the input of AI to achieve even more creative, imaginative outcomes, be they to enhance the world, or enhance the ability of AI to go beyond what our tiny little brains can currently conjure up.
Both of these are viable futures, so whether industry uses AI to do the menial work of projects, or maximises AI's potential for creative applications, humans will remain at the centre of how and why we do projects. Either way, emerging project managers will need the technological skills to work with AI and the psycho-social skills to liaise with real people as they seamlessly navigate both the physical and the virtual planes on which projects exist.
Perhaps we will see the emergence of TQ (Technological Quotient) as a measure of our ability to adapt to this brave new world. What is certain is that the skillset of the emerging PM will be even broader than what we know and practice today.
Elemental Projects
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