In Part 1 of this blog we looked at following three trends for 2009:

- #10 The increasing correlation between project management and operational excellence

- #9 The CFO and the project manager friendship

- #8 The rise of the Project Workforce

Now let’s look at the next three trends.

- #7 Dispersed customers, projects and teams kill politics

The flat world and access to a global talent pool has significantly changed the inner workings and team dynamics of virtually all organizations. There are many disadvantages to working with remote dispersed team members, which most of us are doing today. We tend to be happier, more loyal to the team, learn faster, and accomplish more as a team when we work physically close to each other. On the other hand, there are less emotions and politics with a dispersed team; people tend to pay more attention to getting the work done, than playing office politics; and their performance ultimately dictates how they are evaluated. In today’s increasingly dispersed teams office politics is certainly on the decline.

- #6 Finding the right talent gets a lot easier

It is much harder to find the matching resources you need when you limit yourself only to looking for talent in a local market. The flat world, Internet collaboration technologies have made it possible for organizations to tap large remote pools of talent at very competitive rates. For example, at Tenrox, we are increasingly leveraging specialized programmers working (probably) from their homes in Russia, Eastern Europe and at outsourcing shops in India. These resources are not replacing our full time staff; they complement our team by working on projects on a need basis. It allows Tenrox to remain flexible, not to over-hire, and yet quickly staff projects when required. With better collaboration technologies, improving quality of global resources, and our own improved knowledge of how to manage such projects, this process is becoming a lot easier and rewarding to execute.

- #5 Emphasis shifts from project management to workforce management

The project management discipline has traditionally emphasized the science of project management. Project managers and contributors are encouraged to follow strict templates, guidelines and steps to ensure a project is executed successfully. However, in spite of the increasing number of certified project managers and great project management tools, projects continue to show high failure rates, or high rates of disappointment by being too late, cost too much, or not fully meet their intended objectives. Numerous studies have looked at why projects disappoint. Many of these studies often conclude that better project management, communication, stakeholder involvement and change controls would have reduced failure rate. However, as books like Built to Last (Collins Business; 1 edition; November 2, 2004) suggest while best practices and better tools help there is nothing more important than picking the most qualified and best-fit resources to run the project (what Jim Collins called having the right people on the bus). Having the right people on the team makes everything easier; in fact, less process and less enforcement is needed since great team members innately know what needs to get done and just do it. As a result, more and more organizations are investing in cataloging their resources, understanding their resource’s capabilities and interests, and using more sophisticated workforce planning tools to find the best resources for their projects.

In the last and final part of this blog we will look at the top 4 project management trends in 2009.