9 Project Management Trends in 2023 – Where Are We Headed?

Which project management trends will we see in areas such as resource planning, collaboration, methods and tools? How are the roles of the participants in the project environment going to change? And what new challenges are in store for the PMO?

In this article (updated in early 2023), we take a look ahead to the coming years in agile, traditional and hybrid project environments. The trends, however, do not apply to all industries and types of projects in the same way. We combine our own experience with the information from public sources and derive the main points from this. Based on assessments and forecasts, you will be able to implement the right strategies for your project management environment.

Our goal: you have peace of mind, knowing that you always have full control over your project environment.

These are the topics in store for you:

• Some recent studies
• Trend 1: Artificial intelligence in project management is on the rise
• Trend 2: Self-determined working in flexible environments
• Trend 3: Resource planning is becoming more and more important
• Trend 4: Greater focus on the benefits of results
• Trend 5: Knowledge sharing continues on the rise
• Trend 6: Agile and hybrid methods continue to gain importance
• Trend 7: Change management is becoming more important
• Trend 8: The PMO is becoming more strategic
• Trend 9: PM tools and automated data use
• Conclusion: 9 Project management trends in 2023

Let us start.

Some Recent Studies

The world has changed significantly in the last few years – not least due to the COVID-19 pandemic, digitization or climate change. This also has an impact on our professional world.

This is how the German Handelsblatt headlined its report on STEM Reporting (German: MINT-Reporting): “Short of over 275,000 skilled professionals – Shortage of experts already greater than before COVID”. A massive gap for the future presenting the world of work with new challenges. This trend continues even today.

This has an impact on the skills required of employees – the so-called future skills. The Stifterverband and McKinsey & Company published the “Future Skills Framework 2021” (German language). According to this source, it is possible to differentiate four categories:

• Traditional skills
• Key digital skills
• Technological skills
• Transformational skills

The survey of 500 companies and public sector agencies in Germany demonstrates that the respondents rate the importance of individual skills differently today than for the future.

Above all, the respondents considered the skill of problem-solving ability important, as well as entrepreneurial behavior, initiative, resilience and creativity. And it is exactly these skills that will gain importance over the next few years according to the survey.

Key digital skills, too, are coming more and more into focus, as is agile working.

Yet, which project management trends can be derived from these developments? Let us get into our forecasts.

Trend 1: Artificial Intelligence in Project Management Is on the Rise

Since late 2022, the ChatGPT chatbot has been making waves in the press. This bot creates answers from generally available data which are surprisingly good for the most part. So far, the artificial intelligence (AI) tool has been trained with information from the internet up to and including 2021.

A trend we see is AI becoming more and more prevalent in professional life. At this stage, tools like ChatGPT often work very well for general questions. However, this does not apply to answers in response to issues within an individual project, for example, as the bot is missing the individual data for this.

A poll in a German-language TPG webinar from January 2023 asked where the participants would like to see AI support in project management. These are the results for the topics in descending order:

• Resource planning (61%)
• Risk management (54%)
• Project planning (48%)
• Updating projects (38%)
• Other areas (32%)

Under the AI label, tool manufacturers currently primarily promise AI support which can also be attained from the existing project data with good reporting. Additional information with added value generated by AI does not exist at this point. AI support would be helpful in the following areas:

• Automatic resource leveling
• Automatic updates of the project plan
• Questions like “What would happen if this project task were shifted …”

Here, it is currently not in sight, but people are certainly working on it.

Our tip: Just play around with tools like ChatGPT. Learn how to benefit the most from the bot by making your questions more and more specific. At the same time, find out what the current limitations of the tool are.

Trend 2: Self-Determined Working and in Flexible Environments

Microsoft publishes the annual Work Trend Index. It provides insight into the wellbeing of employees in a remote working world and shows what senior staff should be paying special attention to now.

A clear trend becomes apparent which also applies to the project environment of the future: more and more participants want to set their own work rhythm, i.e. when and where they take care of their responsibilities, and how. This concerns:

• Self-organized working
• Dividing the workplace between office and home
• Working in teams as familiar from agile methods

In the future, predefined processes and methods will often become only guidelines that are not always mandatory.

For the most part, young team members will be used to this already (e.g. they work via chat in their team, less with official e-mails). Knowledge is combined and shared. A modern project management solution can be expected to support this approach.

Like in the agile world, this can lead to the following situation: the results in the project are partly the responsibility of the team, not only of the project manager. The project managers’ responsibilities, including the coordination and mediation between the stakeholders, will change more and more in the direction of spokesperson of the team. However, the non-delegable responsibility for e.g. the project budget is sure to remain with the project manager.

Our tip: When working from home, hold more but shorter regular meetings for substantive topics. Personal calls will help you feel how the team is doing. Moreover, consider how the project managers can change their role. This can lead to greater cohesion within the team involved in the implementation.

Trend 3: Resource Planning Is Becoming More and More Important

The recent studies and surveys have clearly shown that project resource management is becoming more and more important – even at the top levels. All roles must be involved.

Project Management Office (PMO)

Thus, the PMO for example is increasingly taking on the coordination of resource management alongside team leaders and project managers. Together with the decision-makers, this central office has to provide capacities with the appropriate skills in a forward-looking manner.

Team Leader

The team leaders are increasingly involved in ensuring their team members receive ongoing training. For example, retraining personnel is one way of continuously increasing knowledge. The goal should be to retain employees in the long term. Expanding their knowledge will not only strengthen the staff’s ties to the company but will also provide for employee satisfaction. After all, satisfaction with one’s own job is becoming more and more important in the fast-moving labor market.

Project Manager

Project managers are increasingly engaged in finding solutions for clear goals and social skills. Traditionally, it used to be possible to define a clear goal with the project order. These days, however, we are often unable to fully define this, which makes a different approach to the topic necessary. In addition, the constantly growing number of projects means that the responsibility of the project managers to adequately take care of everything has increased.

Team Members

Mastering all of this, requires team members to deal honestly with ambiguity, lack of knowledge, and deadlines. After all, the main reason for unsuccessful projects is missing goals or failure to define them clearly.

Our tip: Good resource management will only work together – in the interaction between project manager, team leader, team member and PMO. Lay the foundations with processes and tools.

Resource Management Must Be Complete and Good Enough

Unfortunately, the resource situation is not easing in most industries and companies. There are those who still have too few employees and those who suddenly have too many. Thus, the trend towards optimizing the workload of existing employees continues unabated. Those responsible will have to try to make the unpredictable predictable.

In order to do this, they need to know what their employees are working on – not just in projects but also in operations.

The processes for resource planning must ensure the involvement of the team leaders in the coordination process between project and line management. Only by looking at both perspectives, will you obtain complete and therefore reliable resource planning.

To make matters worse, new requirements for further projects and future fields of knowledge come up at ever-shorter intervals. These have to be taken into account more flexibly in strategic capacity planning.

Reading tip: 6 Steps to Resource Management – Implementing Tactical Planning

For this reason, PMO and portfolio managers require even better support in variable scenario planning. In accordance with the priorities and availabilities of the coming months and years, they have to decide which new projects to start, and when. Some also have to be very flexible in postponing projects and bowing to the new external circumstances.

Rough yet complete resource planning is more helpful for this purpose than precise planning for only a few projects. There is growing acceptance of the “Complete and good enough” approach. What is more, companies are increasingly turning away from Excel in the resource management context, as the tool is just not flexible enough. Special tools for resource management are much better suited to this.

Our tip: Rough and complete resource planning (all operations, absences and project activities) is better than planning a few projects in detail while being incomplete overall.

Undisturbed Working Furthers Efficiency

If your employees are scarce as it is, they should at least be able to work without interruptions. See to it that your employees:

• Are not kept from working by being in team meetings around the clock
• Have fewer externally controlled days and are able to divide up their time better
• Do not have to be available all the time for more undisturbed working (even when working from home)

Social and Soft Skills for the Project Management of the Future

If you are working in the project environment, you should consider a few pointers concerning social and soft skills. They will help you be all set for the future trends in the ever more complex project environment and increasingly challenging resource management:

• See the people, not things, behind the term ‘resources’
• Encourage creativity in finding solutions
• Allow for failed attempts and factor them in
• Create trust as the basis for honest appraisal of the circumstances and tasks
• Provide for less stress in projects caused by uncertainties (I’m not at home in the subject, we won’t finish, etc.)
• Create an environment in which teams feel comfortable and do not want to run away
• Overall, there is a trend requiring project managers to become (like) team leaders – “You can manage things, but you have to lead people.” And why is that so? From the company’s perspective, this is the guiding principle which will be perceived as increasingly true as skilled labor becomes scarcer: “The most important things are no things.”

A poll on the resource situation in a TPG webinar (German language) confirmed the importance of pain points in resource management: Problems with processes, staff, skills and tools are common.

Trend 4: Greater Focus on the Benefits of Results

Today, it is not enough that something is meant to be done. Increasingly, we ask about the how and the why. Very often, the team members want to know what they are contributing to with the project.

Projects in the area of organization and software are subject to rapidly changing environments and have to be guided even more by the intended benefits, which can change even during the project’s lifetime.

A poll in our 1/2023 webinar showed that more than half the participants defined the project benefits at the beginning and reviewed them in the course of the project.

Missing targets is becoming increasingly difficult to afford. Hence, your portfolio should be increasingly focused on the actual benefits of the results of your projects. Once the intended benefits of a project can no longer be achieved, discontinuing the project is a good decision. This is particularly important in an environment of scarce resources.

Our tip: Consider how to implement three-part project planning with a focus on the project benefits (e.g. in portfolio management). A suggestion would be:

• Description of the goals and the benefits
• Roadmap with phases, milestones and deliverables for the recipients of the service
• Internal detailed planning with the activities for achieving the deliverables for (increasingly self-organized) teams

 

Trend 5: Knowledge Sharing Continues on the Rise

You will be a familiar with this problem: gurus as a single source keeping their important knowledge to themselves create bottlenecks in resource planning.

If you have too few suitable staff members with similar knowledge whom you can deploy at the same time, this will lead to resource conflicts. The closer the skills of the available staff members are to each other, the easier it will be to assign them. This will automatically reduce conflicts.

Yet, this will only work if you really share the knowledge. Hence, it is not the actual number of people that is the problem but the bottlenecks for certain skills.

You may be faster on your own in the short term. In the long term, however, you will get further together. In agile environments, this mindset is the norm. Yet, for many established traditional organizational structures, this kind of rethinking will be a major challenge.

The trend towards sharing knowledge is becoming more and more prevalent regardless of the industry. As a project management trend, it is increasingly exhibited by the younger generation.

Our tip: Ensure that the knowledge of key experts is distributed among several heads.

Trend 6: Agile and Hybrid Methods Continue to Gain Importance

In the traditional project management environment, we have so far seen changing assignment to projects in different teams. This approach, however, is becoming more and more problematic. In the agile world, on the other hand, teams remain constant across many iterations. They work together in the true sense to achieve usable results.

The feasibility and the scope of the intended results was previously estimated by the agile teams themselves in advance and divided into Sprints. This makes it much clearer what actually can be achieved and what cannot. Everyone knows:

• Who is able to do what
• What can be seen as reliable
• What is rather uncertain

Moreover, team members in a consistent familiar team will find it much easier to share knowledge.

More and more companies are adopting this approach with success. Hence, agile methods will also continue to gain importance in the future.

Our tip: Look into agile methods and consider what you might be able to adopt at your company – e.g. the synchronized planning of teams.

Hybrid Approaches in Project Implementation

In our fast-paced world, it is more important than ever to look at usability, not at a specification. With agile methods, the focus is on the final product from the beginning. However, there is an open-ended approach, and the usability is questioned on a regular basis. This can ultimately lead to a final product that is different from the original plan, and yet everyone is happy with it.

This agile approach, used in appropriate projects (building a dam would not be an appropriate project for this), prevents that the changed requirements are ignored in development. In traditional project management, this can happen, if the circumstances change during the project term.

Project managers are responsible for the benefits of the project outcome. The trend is definitely moving in the direction of being able to recognize earlier if one is off the mark (“fail cheap”) or providing a benefit earlier.

Often, hybrid approaches combining the advantages of the agile with the traditional world are the right solution for certain projects. The figure below shows the combination of traditional milestone planning with regularly timed Sprint planning. In this case, the Sprints always have to provide the results for the next milestone.

Our tip: Inform yourself to find out which of your projects are appropriate for hybrid approaches and what the combination could look like in your case.

Reading tip: Hybrid Project Management – How to Connect Agile and Traditional Methods

Trend 7: Change Management Is Becoming More Important

In the context of digitization, organizational changes are often implemented as projects. In this process, something often goes wrong. Implementing a new software tool, for example, may not bring the desired benefits, as the prospective users have not been duly accommodated, prepared or taken along.

To make projects successful, it is indispensable to duly address the change process in the organization in parallel to the actual content implementation. This is the task of change management in projects.

It will depend on the scope of the changes and the number of people affected whether taking care of the change will be a task for the project manager. However, it probably always makes sense in such ventures to get change management specialists on board.

This insight may not be new. Still, lately people have not only talked about it but acted on it. Change management is a key success factor for projects in the future.

A poll in our 1/2023 webinar revealed that a third of the participants still saw no real response to resistance to changes – a deplorable number with a lot of potential for the companies affected. The same result applied to the need to follow up on results of trainings. At least, a majority regarded training (61%) and sponsors (59%) as necessary in the context of changes.

Our tip: In change projects, ensure from the beginning that the people affected by the changes are properly prepared and also assisted.

Trend 8: The PMO Is Becoming More Strategic

The PMO is increasingly taking on responsibility for the implementation of strategic targets.  Organizationally, it is most beneficial if the PMO is established as an executive department with direct access to top management.

In this context, successful strategic capacity planning requires an enterprise-wide resource overview and good skills management. Finding and training appropriate resources is essential, as is their even more dynamic assignment to strategically valued projects.

In portfolio management, the PMO should work more towards the abort of weaker projects in the future. A purposeful project abort will free staff members on time for projects with a higher priority.

The term “fail cheap” is not new, yet it is particularly important in this context. It makes sense to recognize failure early and take appropriate action before the damage becomes even greater. This supports the cultural change needed in the future towards successful project failure.

Our tip: Ensure from the top down that failed projects can be recognized as such and aborted. This requires a cultural change throughout the company that takes away the project managers’ fear of failure.

Another poll in a German TPG Webinar regarding the desired future PMO functions arrived at the following results: the respondents rated the support of the project managers highest, followed by standardization and reports, involvement in portfolio management and the coordination of resource management. All four responsibilities were desired by over 50% of the 270 webinar participants.

In the future, PMOs must brace themselves for the following changes:

• Stronger ties to the boardroom / top management
• Not only creating standards and reports
• More coordination in resource management
• Stronger involvement in portfolio management
• Flexible use of PM methods
• Individual guidance and support for project managers in traditional, agile or hybrid processes and methods for the right mix
• Lessons Learned are to be applied and ongoing adjustments to be made to the PM Guide

Trend 9: PM Tools and Automated Data Use

Even now, it is much easier than before to begin using PM tools. This has become possible through the flexible use of offerings in the cloud.

These tools:

• Are easier to use, as an installation is unnecessary
• Enable easier billing due to monthly licensing per user
• Cause less trouble when it comes to cross-company access
• Enable better collaboration
• Offer the possibility to use different tools on a case-by-case basis
• Are easier to launch and more flexible to use in the cloud
• …

Our reading tip: The article “PMO Tools: Software for Multi-Project Management” first discusses the results of a German-language survey on PMO tools. Then, you will read about an optimum PMO tool environment for multi-project, portfolio and resource management – the PPM Paradise. This is not about the specific PMO software and tools by one manufacturer – instead, you will learn what components will be required and what these should be able to do.

More Support Due to Automation

People are less and less ready to accept the manual compilation and repeated entry of data for reports. The days in which people were already happy when data could be transferred between systems at all are over – there is a call to have existing data automatically consolidated.

Powerful integration middleware can help achieve this. Use cases are for example the bidirectional data exchange between project management and ERP, CRM and work management systems. It allows you to create project reports at the push of a button, without much manual effort.

A poll in our 1/2023 webinar showed that more than 60% of participants are still compiling part of the data manually. That may be a result of history or the necessity to adapt the processes. However, we definitely see a trend towards automation, as this holds an immense potential for efficiency in the project environment. This is underlined by the poll responses: there is a wish to enter data into centralized form-based systems and databases – rather than entering text into files that are difficult to reuse.

Our tip: Find out about suitable cloud-based tools for your (multi-)project management, e.g. in webinars or on YouTube. Often, getting started is much cheaper than imagined, even for very powerful products. And familiarize yourself with e.g. the Microsoft Power Apps instead of Excel and Word. There are modern and powerful solutions that can also be expanded quickly with SAP integration or data exchange with Jira, DevOps and CRM systems.

Conclusion: Project Management Trends

In this article, you have learned which project management trends are foreseeable from our point of view. We have placed particular emphasis on the areas of resource planning, collaboration, roles, methods and tools.

In conclusion, we present all project management trends at a glance:

• Some recent studies
• Trend 1: Artificial intelligence in project management is on the rise
• Trend 2: Self-determined working in flexible environments
• Trend 3: Resource planning is becoming more and more important
• Trend 4: Greater focus on the benefits of the results
• Trend 5: Knowledge sharing continues on the rise
• Trend 6: Agile and hybrid methods continue to gain importance
• Trend 7: Change management is becoming more important
• Trend 8: The PMO is becoming more strategic
• Trend 9: PM tools and automated data use
• Conclusion: Project management trends

Do you see other project management trends which you would like to add? We look forward to receiving your feedback. Thank you.

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