Post 12 - Age of disruption

I was going back on the 'Project Manager of the Future, article written by the PMI and thought I'd share some interesting information about this age of disruption we are living in.


It was interesting to learn that the high competitiveness of this time has lead to a great advancement in technology as well as digital transformation. These transformations have disrupted the way we used to do things in the past and have caused some to be left behind.

The article mentions the big need of moving and developing your skill set beyond that of the 20th century if you are to be competitive in the ever demanding sphere of work.

Do you think you have what it takes to succeed? Ask yourself that important question of what skill sets you have to offer.

It was interesting to note that not all organisations will succeed in this time.

So, who will succeed in this age of disruption?

Those that will succeed in this age of disruption are those that are able to adapt rapidly to new opportunities and challenges through building better products and creating stronger customer relationships with a speed that hasn’t been seen before.


Read the full article below:

https://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/learning/thought-leadership/pulse/digital-pm-skills.pdf?sc_lang_temp=en


Please share your thoughts as usual below

Post 13 - Top Digital-Age Skills for Project Delivery

Following on from the previous blog, where I shared the valuable information of needing to improve your skill set in this age of competitiveness, I thought I'd share with you some of the six most sought after skills for project delivery.

According to the some of the HR professionals that were asked about important skills needed for project leaders these are the top six digital-age skills for project delivery they mentioned.

The interesting thing is that you would think that a customer service related skill would have been mentioned amongst these skill sets but for some reason there hasn't been. 

I am assuming that they are mentioning these skills with the presumption that the candidate has customer skills already. As you are aware that customer focus is of course an essential skill in both technical and non technical positions.

Which of these skills do you think is the most important?

 would you have provided these skills as the most important? 

Do you feel that you posses these valuable skills?

Please share your thoughts and opinions 

Post 14 - Workforce Readiness

I was reading an article today, and was surprised at some interesting information provided by the 'Institute for he Future and Dell Technologies'. They mentioned that about 85% of the jobs that will be available in 2030 have not been invented yet.

This kind of took me aback even though I being a tech enthusiast myself, and having been in the field of computing for the past 10 years.

The interesting question that came to my mind was, what kind of jobs are we not aware of? Could it possibly get any more different than what we have today?

But then again when I think back to the fact that I would never have imagined self-checkout machines replacing  human jobs at supermarkets.

Another interesting point mentioned in the article was the big gap between the skills required and being able to find talent for those jobs.

According to research by the Digital Talent Gap study by LinkedIn and Capgemini, 55% of organisations say the gap between the digital talent they need and the talent they can find today has widened in the last few years, reports. Similarly, 54% of organisations say this gap is hindering their digital transformation programs.

What I see from this is the great focus needed today in improving your skills sets to meet this ever growing demand of digital transformation.

The question we need to ask yourselves is what can we do to improve our skills in order to be competitive and ready for this ever demanding transformation.

I say.... 

If you don't want to be left out in today's ever competitive world, then you need to improve your skills daily.

Please share your thoughts on different ways you could be competitive.

Post 15 - BMP Core Principles Grid

I thought today I'd share this interesting grid displaying the core principles of BPM as well as the critical success enablers taken from last weeks lecture slides.

BMP Core Principles

As you can see that in order to be successful at this, the organisation would need to establish clear BMP Roles and responsibilities in order to be able to assess that the benefit realisations have been met.

Post 16 - Focusing on central tasks to help leaders foster better collaboration

I came across this interesting article emphasising on the focus of a few central tasks to help leaders foster better collaboration.

The main issue, is that of managing teams that don't report to you as well as the barriers built up through silos.

Moreover many projects fail because the “ownership of processes and information is fragmented and zealously guarded, and roles are designed around parochial requirements, and the resulting internal complexity hinders sorely needed cross-business collaboration.” this is according to Mckinsey's report.

According to the article, if you want to co-lead a project successfully, you would need to focus on the following three tasks:

1 - get a broad agreement on core problem to solve.
2 - negotiate resources amongst each unit in the organisation.
3-  find common grounds amongst the different units.

For me these, points are quite important and I can see how 'not' following these tasks could lead to a breakdown of agreements between each unit which is something detrimental to the organisation.

Read the full article below:

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-to-lead-effective-cross-functional-teams/

Please share your thoughts below

Post 17 - Are Too Many High Priorities Counterproductive?

I was reading an article in the 'PMWorld360 Magazine' today and came across an interesting discussion on why having too many priorities is counterproductive.


The question I initially asked myself was; don't they always teach us to prioritise one thing at a time? Well as I read on, I realised that the focus of the article was on the prioritisation of actual goals set out by companies and their giving of  more than one 'high' priority task within each department.

The interesting argument given in the article, was that an organisation that sets out more than one 'high' priority task is essentially lacking the structure to make effective decisions on which efforts give the limited resources available.

I can imagine on an individual's goals level, where he has so many high priority tasks at hand, it would be difficult to decide which one to act on first without having to set one priority above the other.

Prioritisation may be that simple for an individual, but how about a huge organisation?

Now, that's the interesting point that the article mentions. Organisations have so many stakeholders and different projects, programs and portfolios running simultaneously, how do you end up agreeing on what to prioritise and allocate the limited resources to.

That's the reason why they argued against having too many high priority goals at the same time which  I agree with.

Read the interesting discussion below:

https://www.pmworld360.com/blog/2018/08/14/why-having-too-many-priorities-is-counterproductive-to-your-top-priority/


Feel free to share your thoughts and opinions below as always.

Post 18 - Project Management - the Ageing Profession?

I thought I'd share with you this article talking about the fact that project management  as a profession is seemingly ageing... in some places.

According to research done in the UK, project Management has gained a reputation for having an ageing population in more recent years.

The interesting statistics graph below illustrates a surprising correlation between the higher the age group, the higher percentage share of practitioners in project management.


As you look at the graph you can see that project management looks like it's getting older year on year.

This interesting correlation could be due to the fact that in project management, an organisation may obviously prefer a more experienced project manager rather than a new inexperienced one.  So someone with 30 years experience would be on higher demand than someone with no experience.

On the other hand, companies don't really want to spend money on someone inexperienced and then have to train them also. I think that this is a fair point.

Read the interesting article below here:

https://www.arraspeople.co.uk/camel-blog/project-management-career/project-management-really-ageing-profession/



Like usual, feel free to comment and share your opinions below: