Emerging Trends in Project Management in 2019

Project management is a constantly evolving field. Common issues in project management don’t go away, so project managers have to continuously find ways to deal with them by improving on things like best practices, data analysis, collaboration, communication, and productivity. Let’s take a look at some of the continuing and emerging trends in project management for the year so far.

Emerging Issues and Trends in Project Management

Project Management Offices

Project management offices, or PMOs, are a department within an organization that is responsible for standardizing project management best practices for the business. Though not something new, PMOs are gaining popularity and can be considered one of the emerging trends in project management.

A PMO is able to develop project management strategies and oversee the implementation of them, which contributes to the increased success rate of an organization’s projects. When a company has a PMO, more projects get done on time and within the budget, and the organization performs better as a whole.

Artificial Intelligence

Automation of project management tasks allows project managers and their teams to do more with less resources, which is why AI is one of the top emerging trends in project management that we will continue to see more of in the future. With the help of AI, project managers will increasingly be able to automate recurring tasks such as data collection and reporting.

Artificial intelligence is something that will increasingly be implemented in project management software, in the form of chatbots or conversational AI (think Siri and Alexa), so that project managers can issue commands and queries via voice or chat. This will allow them to do things like quickly pull data with analysis for reporting. It will also cut down on project failure due to human error because AI will be able to notify project managers of issues and risks that threaten a project.

Real-Time Data

For projects to succeed, it’s crucial for project managers to know exactly what is going on with them at any given time. The ability to pull real-time reports and snapshots of a project’s progress is one of the top issues in project management that project managers seek to solve.

Luckily, the best project management software solves this issue. For example, project management software with a Gantt chart allows you to see an overview of a project’s progress, including task dependencies, critical tasks, and bottlenecks. You can even export reports to get real-time data to share with stakeholders.

Centralized Project Management Software

All organizations can benefit from using project management software to centralize project information. A good project management solution allows teams to collaborate more effectively, communicate better, manage budget more efficiently, track time, delegate tasks, and share files and documents in one central location.

The average employee uses about 12 different tools to manage all of their day-to-day tasks and collaborate with their team. Since every platform and app has a different UI and UX, this ends up being counterproductive because it’s hard to get everyone on the same page about what tools to use and how to collaborate. Centralized PM software solves this by cutting down on the number of tools needed to get the work done and reducing the learning curve to get everyone on board.

Emotional Intelligence

Project management is very process-based, which makes it easy to forget that there are real people with real emotions involved in every project. That’s why it’s important for project managers to have emotional intelligence, or the ability to be aware of and express emotions as well as handle interpersonal relationships with empathy.

Emotional intelligence is one of the emerging trends in project management because it’s become increasingly necessary for project managers, clients, team members, and stakeholders to communicate using emotional intelligence. Communicating using emotional intelligence removes barriers between people, leading to increased performance and higher project success rates.

Remote Teams

Companies are increasingly allowing remote work by their employees, and even recruiting a globally distributed workforce. This allows companies to assemble teams consisting of highly-skilled individuals with the right skills — without being limited by location.

In fact, studies have shown that remote teams are actually more productive than in-house teams. Remote teams are another one of the top emerging trends in project management because when you have a team with the best talent from anywhere in the world, combined with increased productivity from remote workers, projects directly benefit.