It may be that leaders don’t value project management because its methods are too complex to be easily applied.
Typical is the attitude of one executive who recently told me, “If you want to make sure that something is not done, make it a project.”
The problem is, many leaders still don’t appreciate the value of projects and write them off as a waste of time. This transformation to a project economy will have profound organizational and cultural consequences. In a similar move, the Richards Group, the largest independently owned ad agency in the United States, has removed almost all its management layers and job titles and now refers to most of its employees as project managers. In 2020, Mohamed Alabbar, the founder and chairman of Emaar, the giant Dubai-based property developer, announced that as part of a shift to project-based work, the company had abolished all traditional job titles-including his own-and that employees would now be defined not by the department to which they belonged but by the projects on which they worked. Some companies are already starting to make this change.
AGILE PROJECT CANVAS SERIES
In fact, in organizations the entire decision factory should be thought of as nothing but projects.”īetter Project Management: Series reprint “The average person in an office thinks that their life is some sort of regular job,” he told me, “and that the projects they work on get in the way of doing it. “We will have only project roles.” That’s where the management thinker Roger Martin believes we already should be. “Soon we will no longer have job descriptions,” one senior IBM talent executive told me. In 2017, the Project Management Institute estimated that the value of project-oriented economic activity worldwide would grow from $12 trillion in 2017 to $20 trillion in 2027, in the process putting some 88 million people to work in project management–oriented roles-and those estimates were made before nations started spending trillions on pandemic-recovery projects.įorward-looking companies have recognized the organizational implications of this surge. The percentages are probably even higher in China and other leading Asian economies, where project-based work has long been an important source of growth.Īnd we’re only just getting started. Precise data is hard to come by for other countries, but similar percentages are likely to apply in most other Western economies. In Germany, for example, projects have been rising steadily as a percentage of GDP since at least 2009, and in 2019 they accounted for as much as 41% of the total. Meanwhile, projects (which involve the changing of organizations) are increasingly driving both short-term performance and long-term value creation-through more-frequent organizational transformations, faster development of new products, quicker adoption of new technologies, and so on. But for most of the current century, productivity growth in Western economies has been almost flat, despite the explosion of the internet, shorter product life cycles, and exponential advances in AI and robotics.
That shift has been a long time coming.ĭuring the 20th century, operations (which involve the running of organizations) created tremendous value, and they did so through advances in efficiency and productivity. Quietly but powerfully, projects have displaced operations as the economic engine of our times. They need to adopt a project-driven organizational structure, ensure that executives have the capabilities to sponsor projects, and train managers in modern project management. The Way ForwardĬompanies need to reinvent their approach to project management. As a result, only 35% of the projects undertaken worldwide are successful-which means we’re wasting an extravagant amount of time, money, and opportunity. The Problemĭespite this shift, many leaders still undervalue projects and project management. By 2027, some 88 million people around the world are likely to be working in project management, and the value of project-oriented economic activity will have reached $20 trillion. Projects have displaced operations as the economic engine of our times.
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