Disruptive technologies in Agile Project leadership

The term “age of disruption” is popping up more than ever in all contexts. Associated with this concept you may have a lot of questions. What does it mean to live in the age of disruption? how is it going to affect my business? what can I do as a leader to navigate through these complex times we’re living in? and furthermore, how can my team and I be reinforced in this new reality? Read this carefully. You may find some hints

Will disruptive technologies change the project leadership landscape?

The Project Management Institute (PMI) conducted a research in February 2018 including more than 1,700 project managers, PMO directors and C-Suite level executives. The goal was clear. How can we use disruptive technologies to maximize the benefits in VUCA environments?

As project leaders, is difficult to escape the impact that disruptive technologies are having in the global scenarios. 91% of the organizations that were surveyed by PMI in this study recognized that they are being impacted by disruptive technologies. Either if it is a tool or resource employed in production (for example, artificial intelligence or additive manufacturing) or a finished product itself (such as drones) they are ready to change everything. The question is, are we ready lead the change? In order to do so, we need to know more about the strategies itself. Let’s find out.

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The three technologies that are changing everything

The study identifies three main areas that are having a huge impact in the project management landscape, and consequently we can use in order to have a competitive advantage. Find them described here and with a little actionable advice on how you can make them your competitive advantage as well. They also include an example of a tool that you may want to use.

Cloud solutions: project managers leading initiatives that include cloud solutions can increase flexibility, lower costs and reduce development time, and consequently, time to market. The cloud offers innovative ways to access and share information that opens up a new level on how the work is done and delivered to the client. And if you want to put it into practice now, try migrating some of your documents to solutions such as Office 365.

Artificial Intelligence: this trend is making our cognitive capacities grow and to be able to make better decisions based on the analysis of huge amounts of data collected and processed by computers, which with no doubt will have an impact in project management. Solutions such as Pega (https://www.pega.com/) allows you to use this competitive advantage in a user-friendly way.

Internet of Things: generating ecosystems of connected devices that exchange information with each other having the ultimate goal of creating a network in mind is crucial in some sectors, such as supply chain or retail. Processing all the information and taking data-informed decisions can help us outperform expectations. Simple and ready to use solutions like the ones of Mokosmart (https://www.mokosmart.com/) can be a great starting point in our IoT transformation.

Three key factors to keep in mind when it comes to disruptive technologies in project management.

The study identify some areas that lets us identify what can we as project leaders so our organizations do to not get lost in this disruptive transition:

Think about a mature digital transformation strategy: the best way to face changes is to prevent them. A well-documented and comprehensive strategy that includes a benchmarking and prospective studies related to the technological advancement of our competitors will definitely help.

Make disruptive technologies a priority: fast-tracking the adoption of those technologies and running experiments implemented then in controlled environments are key factors to our success. Establishing metrics to measure those experiments should be indispensable.

Be tolerant to risk: being ready to know that failure might happen is essential in innovative technology led environments. Having always a “b-plan” focused on minimizing the impact of failure is the best way to do so. Risk may happen, but what makes the difference is how you do react to it.

As a conclusion, we would like to state that despite technological trends or strategic factors, we should keep in mind that a huge portion of a successful digital transformation plan is always related to change management from a people-centered perspective. That’s why we encourage you to write to us if you want to take your digital transformation to the next level without forgetting your people.

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