2023 Project Management Tips

A new year provides opportunities for project leaders. Here are four key project management tips for 2023 from leading professionals.

Looking back helps us look ahead. Reflecting on accomplishments and lessons learned in 2022 can help project professionals plan for a successful 2023. In a recent Projectified^® episode, Project Management Tips for 2023 and Lessons Learned From 2022, professionals shared what project managers need to do in order to thrive this year.

So, what is in store for 2023? Here are four tips to help project professionals reach their goals.

Learn to manage stakeholders.

The ability to effectively relay a project’s business value is a must. That’s why project leaders agree that engaging stakeholders is the key to meeting expectations and keeping projects on target.

“The one thing I would encourage project managers to develop is their influential skills for their project stakeholders. This may include their own project team and also the project sponsors or project owners. They will be able to articulate the project benefits and also the common goal that everyone wants to achieve through the conversation with these key stakeholders. And then make sure that they will be able to bring them on board to the journey to deliver this project,” explained Malong Dong, director of enterprise portfolio management at the Reserve Bank of Australia in Sydney.

Kiersten Gray, program director at Argodesign, Brooklyn, N.Y., agrees that conversations with stakeholders need to happen.

“…To become a leader with a particular lens, or a focus or point of view on what a project can do for a client’s business strategy is a new opportunity that a lot of project managers are going to have to lean into and build up their resilience to be able to have those conversations,” she said.

Emphasize power skills.

Successfully managing stakeholders requires strong communication skills to ensure that a message is delivered clearly, making  communication the top power skill, according to PMI’s research.

“Communication — making sure that your message is delivered, understood and shared — this requires increased empathy. That, for me, is key in order to manage all this complexity,” said Manuel Segura Perez, head of project and construction management within the engineering division at Repsol in Madrid, Spain. “We are in a moment of time where the weight of the technology, digitalization and so on is taking such a significant role in all our everyday activities that I’m worried that sometimes we will lose the perspective that, at the end of the day, we need the people and the teams engaged, having trust, and a desire of collaboration among them and understanding each other.”   

Focus on using agile approaches.

Projects are more complex than ever. They rise to meet global challenges, embrace new technology and test boundaries as teams span across the globe. That’s why Elton Soares, project manager at General Electric in Florianópolis, Brazil, believes agile ways of working are important.

“As we have seen, projects are more complex than ever: You require even more data management processing power. People working throughout many countries. You have more individuals in your team. You have most large organizations getting ready to run their operations in an agile way. So, I expect, in the next year, a growth in using agile methods,” he said.

Keep sharing knowledge. 

Exchanging knowledge between people, teams and organizations offers collaboration and can potentially lead to more innovation, which ultimately helps businesses thrive. Sharing experiences and know-how as project leaders can help teams prosper. 

“The one thing that we’ll need to do is just to tell our stories as project managers and share the knowledge as well and the lessons learned. That can really go a long way and assist other people as well,” said Nontobeko Mathenjwa, a project manager at the South African National Roads Agency Limited in Johannesburg, South Africa.

To hear more from these project professionals and learn what else they anticipate for the project world this year, listen to Project Management Tips for 2023 and Lessons Learned From 2022.

View More Digital Exclusives