Project Management Tips for 2023 and Lessons Learned From 2022
Transcript
STEVE HENDERSHOT
As we start a new year, we’re catching up with project leaders about what’s ahead for the world of projects, as well as the successes and lessons learned from 2022.
One must-have in 2023? For Nontobeko Mathenjwa, it’s knowledge-sharing and storytelling—and not just within her own teams or organization.
NONTOBEKO MATHENJWA
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.
NARRATOR
The world is changing fast. And every day, project professionals are turning ideas into reality—delivering value to their organizations and society as a whole. On Projectified®, we’ll help you stay on top of the trends and see what’s ahead for The Project Economy—and your career.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
This is Projectified®. I’m Steve Hendershot.
Having navigated the disruption of the pandemic, project leaders now must prepare for another challenge: shepherding their teams and initiatives through global economic uncertainty with heightened oversight and tightened budgets.
Here’s a straightforward strategy for doing so: Point to the value your teams have delivered thus far; lean into the adaptability, resiliency, innovation and efficiencies you’ve acquired along the way; and make sure your stakeholders know how your track record and capabilities translate to business value and success.
These are some tips from a few project pros who joined us on Projectified® last year. Today we catch up with them to talk about lessons learned in 2022 and look toward the challenges and opportunities to come in 2023. You heard earlier from Nontobeko Mathenjwa in South Africa, speaking to the importance of sharing stories, and we’ll hear more from her later. First, though, I caught up with Elton Soares, project manager at General Electric in Florianópolis, Brazil.
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STEVE HENDERSHOT
What was the biggest change you observed over the course of 2022, and how has it affected the way you lead projects?
ELTON SOARES
Well, the biggest change I have seen is the concern about delivering value. Many companies have already changed their mindset to focus on their goals as their customers perceive it, and how that adds significance to what they are doing in the world. That mindset change affected strongly how we lead projects. Now people are focusing on what’s really important to the customer. Are they really happy with what we are delivering to them?
STEVE HENDERSHOT
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned as a project leader?
ELTON SOARES
I have learned that we can always do better. For example, you can always do better when you have the best tools at hand to manage your projects, although, without proper assessment, they are going to be useless. Measuring its effectiveness is a great way to select from your toolbox the right tools for each project size, customer requirements and stakeholder expectations.
You can also do better, for example, whenever you feel that you can reduce waste. And that’s not only physical waste; we can talk about waste of time, money, resources.
And to finish this topic, when you care for another person, you can always do better. The new edition of the PMBOK [Project Management Body of Knowledge®] puts the project manager [as] not only a manager of project objectives. They are now taking care of the team. No matter how unknown they are to you or whichever are their thoughts, the power to be helpful is in the project manager’s hands.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
What has you most excited about 2023?
ELTON SOARES
The new view of the project manager from the last edition of the PMBOK—7th edition—is going to be even more put into practice. So I expect people to feel that we can also have a steady hand to lead throughout the projects, and also to be a coach, a mentor who cares about the team, who focuses on improving their team and getting the better from everyone.
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 operation in an agile way. So I expect in the next year a growth in using agile method.
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STEVE HENDERSHOT
Team dynamics are just one concern for project leaders starting the new year; stakeholder involvement and expectations are changing, too.
Nontobeko Mathenjwa, a project manager at the South African National Roads Agency Limited in Johannesburg, says those changes are affecting the way she approaches projects.
NONTOBEKO MATHENJWA
You find that communities can either really break or make your project, and how you effectively manage them through stakeholder engagement has become key. It really takes you out of your comfort zone of being an engineer and just really focusing on your technical capabilities or looking at the technical things about the project.
What I’ve learned is the importance of communicating the vision effectively. You can imagine having now these different stakeholders being interested in a specific project; they’ve got their own vision about this project and how they want to benefit from it. Now what has become very important for me is being able to communicate the vision effectively so that all the other visions align to the main one. In my case then [the vision] is obviously implementing the project in terms of upgrading the road, but also the bigger vision is that through the upgrading of the road, then we are able to achieve socioeconomic development, which is really the big objective here as well.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Agency-based project teams are seeing client needs and expectations evolve, too. Kierstin Gray, a program director at Argodesign in Brooklyn, New York, says her teams are learning to flex and innovate in light of those changes.
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STEVE HENDERSHOT
What’s the biggest change you’ve seen over the past year?
KIERSTIN GRAY
The biggest change I’ve seen in terms of creating and maintaining and managing project work has been just how much clients have shifted the game in terms of what they’re asking for project teams to deliver and do. I think that there’s been a lot of challenges finding the right fit for a project management role, and I think that that has come about because a lot of clients have either taken work in-house, meaning they have a lot of need for that project management talent to be inside the walls of their building or embedded on their teams. Or they’ve simply pulled back some of the funding that they typically would have used for longer projects that probably would have needed more management support, in favor of sort of having a model where there’s a bit of a fractional system of resources being used, where project managers aren’t necessarily fulfilling their role full time on work but they’re fulfilling some of the elements of project management across a number of different projects. A little bit of resource-sharing, I suppose you could call it.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
So how is this affecting how you lead projects, both in the near term and going forward?
KIERSTIN GRAY
I try to take a dual-pronged approach to think about how circumstances like this affect me as a leader and also as a model for the kind of work that I think that we should be doing within our studio, as well as what can be a model for more inexperienced project managers and how they might be able to navigate a similar situation.
On one hand, I think that it’s really important for us to be nimble and flexible, to be able to meet the client where they are, even if that’s not necessarily in an advantageous space. On the other end of it, I think that it’s also important to really advocate for the best way of working. And sometimes that’s taking a bit of what we’re not doing and a bit of what we are doing and saying, “Okay, so we know that we have a need to deliver almost close to what we would deliver if we had a full team.” But why do we continue to feel that we have to deliver perhaps a larger scope or perhaps a more standard or more traditional approach to it using a smaller team? Maybe we should change our perceptions of what should be delivered. Maybe it’s an opportunity to look holistically and ask whether or not we should be really approaching the client challenge in a different way or if the client needs some help reframing or restrategizing: What is going to help them have equivalent or even greater impact by trying to meet the moment in the marketplace?
STEVE HENDERSHOT
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned as a project leader in 2022?
KIERSTIN GRAY
I think it is the flex. I tend to be a pretty dynamic thinker; I’m very good at solutioning on my feet. But I think that I’ve had to flex into being more established with my negotiation of project scopes and planning conversations. I’ve had to utilize a lot more science of project management in my conversations with team members and with leadership and with clients, instead of the more adaptive and, I would call, more custom feel of conversation I tend to have with stakeholders.
I use the soft language of saying more customized and bespoke because I do believe that each scenario is different. As much as we want to say that patterns repeat again and again, you’re not ever the same person twice, right? So I like to be able to use that moment and the dynamism of a moment to make decisions, but again, having to tweak and deal with fractional resources or a client who’s not really connecting the value of having full-time resources or perhaps even doesn’t understand the value of a certain approach against their business challenge, I have to bring it back to something which is a lot more concrete than I’m accustomed to doing.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
So looking across the project management landscape, given all the disruptions leaders are facing, what will be the effect on the project world in 2023?
KIERSTIN GRAY
I think that there’s going to be greater reliance on the brass tacks and the business modeling that occurs within projects. Say we’re delivering a new experience for a customer, and this is intended to get them to spend more money or to have greater adherence with our brand. If we find out a piece of information in the research and in the doing of the project to achieve that specific goal that effectively could increase productivity for the company or it could allow them to find greater efficiency in their model, I think that project managers are going to be called upon to do that, and that’s a very new kind of nuance.
The PMBOK [Project Management Body of Knowledge®] talks about business strategy sort of broadly and in the context of managing stakeholders and really understanding how your project may affect the bottom line. But to become a leader with a particular lens or a focus or a POV 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 to build up their resilience to be able to have those conversations.
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STEVE HENDERSHOT
The word “agility” implies the ability to change direction quickly and decisively. And project leaders are increasingly asked to deliver on both sides of that equation, performing with flexibility even amid tight timelines. Manuel Segura Pérez, head of project and construction management within the engineering division at Repsol in Madrid, told Projectified®’s Hannah LaBelle what agility looks like to him.
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HANNAH LABELLE
Let’s start with looking back at 2022. What’s the biggest change you’ve seen over the past year, and how did it affect how you lead projects?
MANUEL SEGURA PÉREZ
There have been a lot of changes in the last year, but the biggest change I have observed from my side is the consolidation of two trends. The first is the acceleration of the project materialization times. Nowadays, the time required for market has been reduced dramatically. So this is affecting the way we are planning and leading the projects, and this needs much more agile management, looking for more collaborative methodologies with a whole ecosystem of project stakeholders. So it’s not only the business teams, but also the engineering, contractors, suppliers of goods and materials and everything.
And more flexibility, and also the need to assume and manage projects with a greater uncertainty and higher risks. In order to achieve this, there’s increasing demand for modularization and repeatability. In our business, energy, oil and gas, there were few modular projects in the past; usually we will go more on stick-built and tailored designs, but these requirements of standardization, modularization and repeatability are growing in order to achieve this demand.
HANNAH LABELLE
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned as a project leader?
MANUEL SEGURA PÉREZ
The need to have a clear and fluid communication with all the project stakeholders—project teams, business partners—and recovering something that we had lost during COVID[-19], which is the personal, the face-to-face contact. I think that the world after the COVID[-19], it’s more complex. The conditions for the development of industrial projects are, I would say, more hostile—the volatility of costs, the uncertainty in the delivery terms, the evolution of the regulation to, in many aspects, more stringent ones. All this is creating an environment where managing the projects requires a deeper understanding of these complexities.
We need to clearly discuss and look for the best allocation of responsibility for the management of these risks and complexities according to the capabilities of each stakeholder of each company. This requires much more intense communication and flexibility in the management.
HANNAH LABELLE
As we begin 2023, what are the top skills that you think project managers should really be leaning into or developing if they don't already have them?
MANUEL SEGURA PÉREZ
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. And then the ability for any strategic planning—looking ahead to develop mitigation plans and actions to be ready when this uncertainty will materialize in our projects.
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. Rebuilding our personal connections and developing great levels of empathy would be key for the next years.
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STEVE HENDERSHOT
One lesson that certainly translates from the pandemic to the next era is the essential role that resiliency plays in project success. Malong Dong, now the director of enterprise portfolio management at the Reserve Bank of Australia in Sydney, says his teams have grown more resilient over the last year.
MALONG DONG
The combination of labor shortages and supply chain disruption has forced project leaders to make difficult decisions one way or another in 2022. At the enterprise organizational level, organizational resilience and agility have become more important.
The way we build up the resilience is to manage the project planning very, very well. We will have three options for each project when we look at the project plan. So there will be the best-case scenario, the worst-case scenario and the normal scenario. The worst-case scenario is the one actually we recommend in the most cases. The reason we do that is we know there’s a high turnover along the way. We might not be able to get the resources we want on time, so that way we will be able to say, “Okay, this is what we can deliver based on what we have.” And then, if something actually is turning [out] to be better than we expected, that means it’s a positive surprise for everyone else. So we are trying to make sure that we can under-commit and over-deliver.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
In addition to greater resiliency, new ways of working and new technologies are influencing how his teams are approaching projects.
MALONG DONG
Most organizations have implemented hybrid working mode; online collaboration and remote work have become the normal ways of working. Smart organizations view the change as an opportunity to sharpen their competitive advantage. For project management, cloud computing offers a whole level of collaboration and information-sharing. Cloud-based applications cover the entire project management spectrum from team meetings, project portfolio management, to business intelligence.
Another change is artificial intelligence or AI. Applying AI in cloud-based applications has been broadly recognized as a driver for innovation. It can be implemented internally for an organization to automate work processes and improve operational efficiency. It can also be applied for business intelligence to analyze customer requirements and consumer behaviors. These trends not only uplift project management capability but also put project professionals in the front line to embrace disruptive technologies.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
And when it comes to must-have skills in 2023, leaning into influence is at the top of the list.
MALONG DONG
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 onboard to the journey to deliver this project.
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STEVE HENDERSHOT
One of the keys to success in 2023 is a thoughtful, honest look back at the projects and experiences of the past year. There are lessons to be learned but also plenty of encouragement and inspiration, and we hope it serves to spur you to ever-greater heights in the year ahead.
NARRATOR
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