Emerging Trends in the Project Management
This paper introduces and evaluates efforts to develop proactive and sustainable process in Project Management. As Project Management Roles have grown and tools, training have emerged to Support Project Management Specialization in the global Marketplace. This Project explains the emerging trends and best Practices in the Project Management.
Introduction
In order to understand the growth, current trends and future of the Project Management, it is necessary to understand where project management started. In Simplest term, project management began when collaborative process was undertaken to achieve collective results. When technology and infrastructure began to define the business process, Technology playing a key role in the Project Management. This Paper concentrates on process to expand project management influence, evaluator tactics and success measurements in Project Management.
Process Supporting the Maturation of Project Management
Project Managers working on imaginative or creative Projects such as software development are challenged by loosely defined process. This is necessary as the innovation that will result from the advancement is unknown until the Project commences. Therefore agile projects are usually associated with the information technology projects. The creation of new technologies via agile projects is not have stringent and commitments to cost and schedule. Understanding the primary function of project manager is to define scope, schedule and cost. This is an issue for the agile project managers. While the triple constraint remain important consideration to the modern project managers, the speed is required for the project managers to bring the new technology to market is critical when one considers the threat and risk of obsolescence. Therefore Project managers may have to concentrate on two areas to be agile and remain complaint. Agile Project Management Methodology is to be adopted when the requirements and Technical solution is unknown.
Emerging trends in the Project Management
Project Management has been with us for many years. Over those years, it has been changed and adapted to fulfill the demands of Product and services that deliver customer value. The following trends will keep the Project Managers upto date and the profession would be alive.
1. Collaboration in the Cloud:-
As technology advances, better ways of collaborating are emerging. Although not specifically designed for project management, they offer many benefits to project teams.
One advance in particular, Cloud Computing, enables better document collaboration across multiple locations and electronic devices.
Recently, my team adopted Google Docs for collaborative creation of project documentation. It enables everyone to work on a single document simultaneously (removing the need to merge updates and changes from multiple sources).
Even Microsoft Provides onedrive for the project Managers to Store, sync, and share work files in the cloud using Microsoft OneDrive for Business, which comes with SharePoint Online and Office 365 business subscription . Through onedrive Project Managers and team members can share, store and sync the document globaly accorss muliti locations without much difficulty.
Even Google drive busines or Personal can be used to share or store the documents freely for personal use and Pay option for Business use. This Media Provides to store, share and sync all your business files with Googlelevel Security. Access your files online, store, share and sync.
Nowadays with the following options the Project Managers and Team members can edit the document globally and manage teams from any where in the world, this helps the Project Managers who are dealing with multi location Projects
2. Multi location Project teams :
More and more project teams are working across different geographies to reduce costs and raise efficiency. It is common for large projects to have significant portions outsourced to India, China and other emerging economies. This trend brings its challenges when it comes to meeting across different time zones.
Although the time-zone problem itself is unchangeable, technology provides a solution. Tools for virtual meetings have developed enough to make them a viable alternative to long-distance travel.
My team, for example, has reduced travel by 90% by using virtual meetings and conference calls with audio and Vedio. Use of this approach seems prevalent in IT. However, this is unsurprising as tech people are usually keen to adopt new technologies
3. Communication challenges in Managing the Remote Teams:-
As projects are increasingly conducted remotely through outsourcing and global expansion, project communication is often based on e-mails and conference calls. Unfortunately, a very small portion of what should be communicated is transmitted to the recipients through these channels. To manage virtual teams, project managers need to find and use best practices in communications. - See more as following.
PMs need to bridge the gap between cloud-based platforms and business expectations.
While cloud based solutions solve a lot of problems, they also create them. As centralization wins over complexity, the high expectations of business owners will need to be managed.
Project organizations will find themselves caught between the cost-benefit trade-off between standardization and customization. Though a strong case can be made that highly customized client-server applications never really delivered the promised business value, project managers will increasingly need to be able to identify, communicate and manage the high expectations of the business owner, within the constraints of cloud-based platforms.
Communication Management will play a vital role in multi location Projects and offshore delivery, the miscommunication leads failure of the projects. We should have a communication plan with the stakeholders and the appropriate communication media and tools should be used.
4. Compressed Project Management Life Cycles:-
Over recent years, the time to bring products and services to market has reduced from years to months. This has placed a demand on project managers and project teams to compress the project management life cycle to deliver more quickly.
Techniques such as iterative prototyping, agile principles and rolling wave planning will play an increasingly important part in reducing the time to market with new products and services
It drives the adoption of agile principles to shorten the project management life cycle.These trends are feeding the development of project management, keeping the profession alive and strong. They are shaping the profession into a more responsive and agile profession, one that aligns with today's business needs. Organizations that recognize these trends—and act on them–will have a competitive advantage.
5. Importance of Stakeholder Management in the Project Management:-
Stakeholder Management is very crucial in the Project Management to make the Project delivery successful. A stakeholder is any individual or group or organization will effect the project negatively or positively, There is no harm with the Positive stakeholders and it is support to the Project. Whereas Negative stakholders will try to damage the project alsways, we need to analyze the stakeholders properly and should manage them intelligently, anything goes wrong with them it may leads to scrap the Project also. Such a adversive effectiveness will be there with the negative stakeholders, so while doing the stakeholder analysis the Project managers should be carefully managed and analyzed.
6. Importance of Test Management in the Project Management:-
Test Management is also play vital role in the Project Management. Nowadays many good tools are in the market to efficient and effective testing in the Projects. In the Test Management, the tracebility matrix is important between the requirements, tests and issues/defects. Many of the test mangement tools provides this functionality. The best test management tool in the market is HP ALM, which provides complete functionality of testing. For SAP testing, there is separate modules provides by SAP including HP ALM,The top test Management tools in the market are PractiTest, TestLodge,TestcaseLab,Qtest,Zephyr, Test Collab, TestLink, HP ALM,Test Rail,Kualitee, Testuff, Qmetry, TestFLO for Jira, Qase, IBM Rational Quality Manager, Panaya, Bugzilla Testopia, Xqal, QAComplete, QA Coverage, Plutora Test, Inflectra, TestMonitor, Meliora Testlab, Borland Silk Central, Gemini, Fitnesse, Tarantula and RTH Turbo.
Test Measurement tracking through KPI is also Important to provide the good Quality Testing. The metrix like defect remove efficiency and defect density will measue the Quality of Testing before go live and also bring the confidence on the defect free Project. Delivery.
Software Testing tools like HP Quick Test Professional(QTP), Selenium, SAP TAO, ECATT, IBM Rational Fuctional Tester, SilkTest, TestComplete, Testing Anywhere, WinRunner, :LoadRunner, OpenSTA, Jmeter, TestComplete, Triecentis Tosca,Right Data, Worksoft, Ranorex Studio, Visual Studio Test Professional and Water are used to automate the Software Testing.
7. Project management office:-
Project management offices ensure a higher chance for organizations to reach their goals. (Imagine the space shuttle without its command center.) PMOs streamline processes, coordinate projects and enable more efficiency in day-today project management. As more companies see the relevance of PMOs, this trend will become increasingly important to overall project management design.
Conclusion
Nowaydays Communication and collobarating the teams accorss the globe from one location (offshore) is not an issue and also, sharing, storing and syncing the documents is also not an issue. Managing the Projects effectively and effeciently is always an issue to the Project Manager from the offshore. Nowaydays Tools and Process are helping some extent to the Project Manager to delivery the Project Successfully and efficiently. Nowaday everyone going for cost effective delivery by all the Companies and it is becoming very easy because of the tools and Process which are available and are mentioned in this Paper. India and Chaina is going to become emerging offshore delivery centers for the coming years Particularly for IT industries..
References
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