New Year is round the corner and as everyone goes in the vacation mode, It gives some time for Organizations, Teams, Project Managers to look back and Inspect, where we are at, in implementing our Project Management Techniques.

As we look back in the last year and review the techniques and processes in implementation, this gives us an insight of what was working and what not. Now, it’s time to Adapt new processes and techniques.

During this time, we did some research and came up with Top 5 Project Management Trends for 2018:

 

1. More Agile!

In 2001, Agile Manifesto for Software Development came into to existence. As the name says – “Agile”, it’s Fast and Easy.

Unlike Traditional Waterfall, Agile welcomes Change. Earlier we had predefined specifications and the team use to work until the project gets delivered. During this time, sometimes market changes or the requirement changes, this leaves the customers unsatisfied and unhappy with the product delivered at the end of the project. Whereas, Agile is more flexible, fast and involves more customer collaboration, involves more small deliveries, therefore ensuring it meets the changing customer requirements.

Looking at the success rate, Every year, More and more organizations are moving towards implementing Agile. Nowadays, it’s being used by different organizations and helping organizations grow with more successful projects.

Learn more about Agile.

 

2. Artificial Intelligence, AI

As we use iPhones/Macbooks these days, we ask Siri to do most of our work with our voice commands. It looks very tiring when Siri doesn’t understand and we have to type our notes or dial a number ourselves 🙂

Now in Project Management, when we don’t have human input and project management and administration happens automatically, we call it Project Management AI.

This is one of the important trend we look forward to in 2018.

Know more about Project Management AI.

 

3. Collaborative Project Management Software

Project Managers are looking for Softwares that involves Project Management as well as Team/Customer Collaboration. This trends mostly focus on one platform with both the features.

You can look for below benefits when using Collaborative Project Management Softwares –

  • Easily Track Work Progress
  • Easily check for due dates
  • Collaborate/Communicate specific to a task/project
  • Just use only 1 platform

There are many Collaborative Project Management Softwares in the market like Asana, Trello etc.

Look for top Project Management Tools recommendations here.

 

4. More Focus on Business Value

Project Managers generally focus on deliverable of the project. The focus should be instead on deliverable of the project in direction of delivering business value. It is very important for Project Managers to stay in collaboration/communication with the customers on regular basis to make sure they understand the product vision, market deviations and to make sure that the projects moves in the direction of delivering business value.

Goal and focus should be on delivering the Business Value.

Learn more about Delivering Business Value here.

 

5. Remote Teams

Many organizations are already implementing the trend of Flexi-timings. This trend is increasing day by day and moving in the direction of allowing people to even work remotely.

There are many reasons why?

  • Increasing expectation of real-time communication from customers
  • Availability of good collaboration/communication tools
  • Cloud Environment
  • More Cheaper

If managed properly, remote teams are proving to be even more productive.

I found out an interesting article where they say – “A recent survey of business leaders at the Global Leadership Summit in London found that 34% said more than half their company’s full-time workforce would be working remotely by 2020.“

 

Looking forward…!

These trends will keep changing every year, our main goal never changes that is the successful deliveries of our projects. Let’s always keep learning, keep improving, keep inspecting & adapting, and keep delivering successful projects 🙂

Wish you all a very Happy New Year 2018 and All the Best!