The frontier of project management technology

Implementation

As the leader, the project manager’s role is to make sure the team members are using the available tools in the best possible way to run the project smoothly. Where communication breaks down, or teams fail to properly implement new methods of sharing, that is the project manager’s fault. It’s not enough to just sit back and tick boxes that task one is done, task two is done and so on. The project manager has to create a positive environment where everyone is comfortable with how they are supposed to be using technological advances. This will ensure that all stages of the project are not just done but done efficiently and to the highest possible standard.

Governance

Managing resources from a distance requires increasingly complicated monitoring infrastructure. With extensive use of technology in project delivery greater use of metrics of performance is possible. This sort of granular insight must be used for positive project governance. For large organisations and those in highly regulated industries, like banking and finance, project governance is still a major challenge for project managers. Ensuring the delivery of the project and appropriate governance are two very different aspects of project management.

Governance goes far beyond simply a binary ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to various tasks being completed or just setting deadlines and then leaving it at that. Governance has to include tracking and reporting and auditing the processes through which the project is delivered. The challenge for project managers is how to demonstrate adherence to different organisations’ project governance methodologies.

Bespoke systems are often the answer to complex governance management, or tailored versions of existing tech products.

Language and cultural barriers

In many ways the more important and often more difficult thing to manage is behaviour. Technology is merely a conduit for human interaction. Ensuring that team members are able to interact and communicate without accidentally setting noses out of joint remains one of the biggest human challenges in this technologically driven work environment. Team members from very different backgrounds and with different expectations and work ethics have to work together. The project manager has to create an environment that encourages open communication while being sensitive to cultural issues that may arise.

Often, it’s the small conventions that people find the most difficult to accept as being different. For example, in countries where its common and expected for emails to begin with a greeting, it can be disconcerting to be interacting with staff whose normal behaviour is to just dive straight into the message. Equally those on the other end can feel uncomfortable with what they perceive as unprofessional and mawkish work emails.

Setting a culture and tone for a particular group brought together for a project is the project manager’s responsibility. If ignored this can be a serious impediment to the smooth completion of the tasks. Striking a balance between establishing standard behaviours, which can verge on cultural imperialism, and making team members aware and sensitive to different practices is one of the major challenges for the modern project manager.

Projects often lose significant amounts of time untangling problems created due to people unthinkingly using highly idiomatic language in work communication. Even between staff of the same nationality there can be problems if they specialise in different fields. People use acronyms and lingo that have either no meaning or, worse, different meanings outside their work environment. Email, instant messaging and other forms of electronic communication can exacerbate the issue, with off-topic back and forth to clarify misunderstandings, offences taken and subsequent messes.

One world future

It seems inevitable that what we’re working towards is technology enabling real-time multilingual interaction. There are on a lesser scale solutions available today such as service desk system ZenDesk, but in the not-too-distant future an email sent to 50 recipients could arrive in their inboxes in their own chosen native language with idioms and cultural references translated accurately or explained. Or a conference call will have live automated subtitling.

YouTube transcription, Google Translate, and other currently available examples show that the results aren’t always great and that the systems need to be refined. Software transcription is improving all the time and as the data set that translation services use grows, the accuracy and dependability will reach the stage of being appropriate for mission-critical communications.

As more and more companies use off-the-shelf solutions that harness the power of cloud-based data and cross-platform access, quality will improve further. Learning curves will be easier to navigate. Interfaces, which software developers traditionally treated as the poor cousins of functionally as a consideration, making programs opaque and onerous, are now improving apace. Usability is the new differentiator for technological options, and a wise project manager knows this.

Whether they use the iPad to document responsibilities in a meeting room with KnowMyTeam, access company data from the train with Dropbox, or communicate and collaborate from home via Skype, workers are embracing the solutions that project managers are directing them to use. Project managers need to accept that empowering their staff with usable and potent devices and services will make their lives much easier in the long run. All told, the way that we work is starting to realise the dream of easy mobility and integration that computers first promised decades ago.