Project Management Looking Forward

I often wonder what Project Management would be like in another 50 years. What would the tools look like? How will people collaborate? Lets do some guessing here. Technology obviously will be ubiquitious and so would be mediums of communication. We are already able to share voice and video (still not there yet). If we assume a terabyte bandwidth, then the only limiting factor seems to the functionality of the project management tool. This guessing game leads me to some obvious questions. We started with single user tools like Microsoft Project, then we moved to shared tools like Microsoft Project Server, Niku, Welcom, etc. I would image a futuristic Project Management tool would have distributed Project Management. I mean distributed Project Management and not distributed Project Management Software, although the latter is a requirement for the former.

I would image project connections much like supply chains in today's manufacturing world. What implications does it have for the atomicity of a project and task? How will the Peer To Peer Project Management world look like?

What about automation? How much of Project Management can be automated? How about general purpose Project Management engines which will keep track of projects. So when someone wants to do a project, the first thing they will do is engage the engine. The engine will then scout and collect resources from around the world. How much learning abilities will these engines have? Will they be able to predict failures, mitigate risk and tackle issues.

I wish more people talked about the future of Project Mangement.

Upswing in the Project Management industry

The Project Management industry seems to be in an upswing these days. Lots of M & A activities in the last 18 months. The PMI thing seems to be getting more and more mainstream. I think there is a trend happening here and it has everything to do with technology. With collaboration technology maturing (or getting better) project portfolio management ROI is starting to show. Companies can now move from the project management world to that of project portfolio management. Unfortunately the PPM tools are still out of reach for many small and medium enterprises.

I wish implementing a PPM tool was not a daunting project in itself.