In one of my earlier posts this month, I talked of Project management in digitization and the benefits that may arise out of these two. We saw how digitzing service/products can lead to better effeciency in managing projects. Today I will go back to that post and review it from another perspective; how digitization is transforming project management and how these two disciplines are being used to achieve planned benefits in an organization.
There is an increased impact of digitization on project management, project managers and organisations. There are unlimited number of project management tools in the market today, both free and commercial. Digitization of what used to take ages, has made it convinient for project managers to move from the laborious task of documentation and collaboration to concetrate more on management. Gone are the days when projects were managed without any technology. Digitization has brought about new culture trends in organizations making great leaps of transformation success. It has become possible today to initiate projects where the benefit owners/sponsors could be sitting on the other end of the globe, without any problems. In 2018, FIFA managed to introduce the concept of VAR (Video Assisted Referee) in World Cup competition, where matches could be analyzed on real time. This is a concept that started in Netherlands in early 2010 and took time before it’s first implementation. The idea which was initially a dream, took lots of project managers in different parts of the world to get it executed properly. Since it’s inception, there have been improved efficiency in officiating matched. The point is, partial digitization of matches has succedded in bringing benefits to both players, sponsors, officials and other stakeholders involved. There are fewer incidences of incorrect judgement by football officials. The project took cross disciplined teams that were well stacked against solving the recurrent problem of incorrect officiating and the end results was to partially digitize the service.
Digitization is changing project management rapidly and massively than anyone would have thought. This can be attributed to the large number of additional internal digitization of projects that continously get initiated but also because customers have become more tech-savvy today and companies have no choice but orient themselves along he market expectations. This has led to advancement in products digitization in favour of customer-specific procedures. Since a “digitized” administration is generally considered to be more efficient, this is not a problem, at least it is often claimed. The speed is infact so fast that project managers are gasping, trying to catch up with the pace at which things are changing. This puts more projects into risk of not realizing the intended benefits as we will see shortly.
Digitization in project management may lead to disoriented stakeholders especially in large teams. Most projects are often interrelated with other projects within a program initiative. If a project is highly digitized and the
interrelated projects are not, this may lead to inappropriate flow of information which may result in costly adjustments. For instance, an ERP system in a company which makes it possible for the finance, sales and warehouse dept. to discharge their duties may be a good idea. now, let’s suppose that a cargo delivery company offers an interface program for the clients to track their orders and a new project is born. The project manager is bound to cordinate with other project managers in the other departments to ensure a seamless integration with the ERP. Digitizing of such a service may be costly if the end product will be a lousy solution bogging the network down. Rescue measures for the misaligned project will often affect other projects.
This is not to say that digitization is bad. Not at all. It all depends on the project manager’s competence and ability to streamline the process. It is important that I should point out that holistic project and portfolio management with central resource planning is able to maintain an overview, set priorities and enforce them as well as to realize controlled client projects and digitization projects. Such a project and portfolio management with upstream demand management will form the backbone of digitization in project management.
Project Management 