It has been perversely comforting over the last 30 years to see that success or failure in managing projects is still determined by the same issues. Indeed, The Seven Keys To Success framework, when it was conceived 15 years ago, explained the fundamental basis for success or failure of every project in the previous 10 years of history of Coopers & Lybrand Consulting as well as Price Waterhouse Consulting. It has been in wide-spread use continuously since then in PwC Consulting and now in IBM, and has helped many Project Managers successfully navigate challenging engagements. And yet there also remain too many times that outcomes are not successful. Inevitably, the reasons – and the missed opportunities that would have altered the course of history - are always understandable against that framework.
As I say, perversely comforting.
And yet there are some seismic tremors being felt in the world of technology-driven projects that have even this old dog thinking he may need to learn some new tricks. I remain convinced that the Seven Keys will continue to be relevant. What I am curious about is how these two phenomena – Big Data and Social Media for Business – might significantly change the landscape over which our projects are conceived and executed.
Let’s start with Big Data. This isn’t just an enabling technology. This is an opportunity to profoundly change businesses – including the business of government – by inventing new benefits arising from merging and analyzing multiple sources of input, some of which are static, but many of which are processed in real time or near-real time. Current examples include smarter cities such as Rio de Janeiro. Other examples can be found in smarter health care with personal monitors that send data in near-real time for pattern diagnostics and alerts to health care providers. What impact would those kinds of projects have on our notion of methods, of business benefit realization, of the breadth of stakeholder landscapes, and of mitigating technical risks?
Now consider social media. Beyond the Big Data aspects (e.g. mining Twitter and Google traffic for behavioral patterns), I am intrigued by the prospects that might arise from crowd-sourcing. How might a project engage a much broader set of stakeholders to understand requirements or test user interfaces using social media? How might a project team find and test technical solutions using social media? Will this, in fact, become the next wave in the realm of knowledge management? Who needs to capture knowledge artifacts in searchable databases if you can connect in real time to the right mind?
Whatever the future of projects and project management bring, I am pretty confident that it will be quite different from the typical project of today.
I’m also pretty confident that five or ten years from now I will still find our collective track records of success perversely comforting.
