Hi there😊,
Today, one of our Project Managers Mariam will talk about Project Management trends in 2022. She will present 7 essential trends that you must know and practice in your work.

Some Recent Studies

The world has changed significantly in the last few years – not least due to the COVID-19 pandemic, digitization, or climate change. This also has an impact on our professional world.
This is how the German Handelsblatt headlined its report on STEM Reporting (German: MINT-Reporting) from November 2021: “Short of over 275,000 skilled professionals – Shortage of experts already greater than before COVID”. A massive gap for the future presents the world of work with new challenges.

This has an impact on the skills required of employees – the so-called future skills.
500 respondents considered the skill of problem-solving ability important, as well as entrepreneurial behavior, initiative, resilience, and creativity. And it is exactly these skills that will gain importance over the next few years according to the survey.
Key digital skills, too, are coming more and more into focus, as is agile working.

〽️Trend 1: Resource Planning Is Becoming More and More Important

Recent studies and surveys have clearly shown that resource planning in project management is becoming more and more important.

Team Leader
The team leaders are increasingly involved in ensuring their team members receive ongoing training. For example, retraining personnel is one way of continuously increasing knowledge. The goal should be to retain employees in the long term. Expanding their knowledge will not only strengthen the staff’s ties to the company but will also provide for employee satisfaction. After all, satisfaction with one’s own job is becoming more and more important in the fast-moving labor market.

Project Manager
Project managers are increasingly engaged in finding solutions for clear goals and social skills. Traditionally, it used to be possible to define a clear goal with the project order. These days, however, we are often unable to fully define this, which makes a different approach to the topic necessary. In addition, the constantly growing number of projects means that the responsibility of the project managers to adequately take care of everything has increased.

Team Members
Mastering all of this requires team members to deal honestly with ambiguity, lack of knowledge, and deadlines. After all, the main reason for unsuccessful projects is missing goals or failure to define them clearly.
To make matters worse, new requirements for further projects and future fields of knowledge come up at ever-shorter intervals. These have to be taken into account more flexibly in strategic capacity planning.

Social and Soft Skills for the Project Management of the Future
See the people, not things, behind the term ‘resources’:

✔️Encourage creativity in finding solutions
✔️Allow for failed attempts and factor them in
✔️Create trust as the basis for an honest appraisal of the circumstances and tasks
✔️Provide for less stress in projects caused by uncertainties (I’m not at home in the subject, we won’t finish, etc.)
✔️Create an environment in which teams feel comfortable and do not want to run away
✔️Overall, there is a trend requiring project managers to become (like) team leaders– “You can manage things, but you have to lead people.” And why is that so? From the company’s perspective, this is the guiding principle that will be perceived as increasingly true as skilled labor becomes scarcer: “The most important things are nothings.”

〽️Trend 2: Knowledge Sharing Continues on the Rise

You will be familiar with this problem: gurus as a single source keeping their important knowledge to themselves create bottlenecks in resource planning.

If you have too few suitable staff members with similar knowledge whom you can deploy at the same time, this will lead to resource conflicts. The closer the skills of the available staff members are to each other, the easier it will be to assign them. This will automatically reduce conflicts. Yet, this will only work if you really share the knowledge.
As a project management trend, it is increasingly exhibited by the younger generation.

〽️Trend 3: Agile and Hybrid Methods Continue to Gain Importance

Often, hybrid approaches combining the advantages of agile with the traditional world are the right solution for certain projects.

〽️Trend 4: Remote Working and Hybrid Work Environments Are Here to Stay

Due to COVID-19, large segments of the workforce have switched to working from home and want to stay there. Others, however, miss the interaction with colleagues in between, e.g. by the coffee machine or in the corridor.
A clear trend becomes apparent which also applies to the project environment of the future: the right mix of remote and onsite working must be found to meet the employees’ wishes and to retain them. This is where companies must adapt.

〽️Trend 5: Change Management Is Becoming More Important

It will depend on the scope of the changes and the number of people affected whether taking care of the change will be a task for the project manager. However, it probably always makes sense in such ventures to get change management specialists on board.

〽️Trend 6: The PMs are Becoming More Strategic

In the future, PMs must brace themselves for the following changes:

✔️Stronger ties to the boardroom / top management
✔️Not only creating standards and reports
✔️More coordination in resource management
✔️Stronger involvement in portfolio management
✔️Flexible use of PM methods
✔️Individual guidance and support for project managers in traditional, agile, or hybrid processes and methods for the right mix
✔️Lessons Learned are to be applied and ongoing adjustments to be made to the PM Guide.

〽️Trend 7: Using PM Tools Is Becoming Easier

Even now, it is much easier than before to begin using PM tools. This has become possible through the flexible use of offerings in the cloud.
These tools:

✔️Are easier to use, as an installation is unnecessary
✔️Enable easier billing due to monthly licensing per user
✔️Causeless trouble when it comes to cross-company access
✔️Enable better collaboration
✔️Offer the possibility to use different tools on a case-by-case basis
✔️Are easier to launch and more flexible to use in the cloud, etc.

Thanks, Mariam for this important information😊. We believe that it will help many people to manage their work properly.

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