Contemporary Trends in Project Management & Business Analysis

Making Agile work for organizations. As the Agile bandwagon continues to grow, some organizations, previously reluctant to jump aboard, are running to catch up. Sometimes, though, Agile is implemented without much thought to unintended consequences of not having enough organizational commitment when adopting Agile. Although such things as not having dedicated teams, a dedicated business product owner, or extending time boxes to fit more work into an iteration sometimes works, there are often related issues, such as team burnout ,Less work being implemented & unmet customer expectations.

Organizations will find a way to make Agile work for them by becoming more intelligent in how they choose to adopt it. As a related trend, we think that some of the Agile leaders will become more flexible, softening the “my way or the highway” approach in favor of one that is more collaborative. It means that organizations will have to articulate the business problem they are trying to solve by adopting Agile. So collaboration will be the new trend

Agile trainings - Agile training will be geared toward entire teams rather than individuals. The policy of sending an individual to agile  training and then to expect him to upscale multiple  is too much for a single person to single-handedly explain and implement the why, what, and how of Agile. Organizations have to generate more internal momentum and motivation for project teams to jump to the agile bandwagon to get the speed of though and action which comes via that it’s like a paradigm shift for doing application development and hence will need commensurate effort by companies to make the tactical shift.

Leadership. Leadership will become more distributed rather than just being concentrated into a single visionary.  Of course this idea isn’t new, but as organizations and project teams tend to incorporate more of agile , it will highlight the value of everyone stepping up to the role of leader.

Leadership is now more than ever , building the right value chain using people to strengthen bottom line. It’s about the people and connecting with them. Leaders are now chosen for their ability to leverage on  the human talent. The far reaching value of making the teams bind within each other to exploit the synergy is foreseen amply.

Enhancement in Innovation and entrepreneurship -  All over the media we see books, articles, and blog posts about innovation these days. Its so much around that sometimes it seems as if everyone seem to have been bitten by the innovation bug. Many organizations will innovate through process and system improvement, and in some cases there may not be any difference initiated at all.

To go beyond mere process, system and continuous  improvement programs , organizations will need to become more entrepreneurial in its basic make up and the way they think  . Innovation centers and Centre of excellence are on the increase, and companies are investing in their own teams to help accelerate the creative process. Smaller boutique creative firms will provide the disruptive break-throughs needed for true innovation and market leadership to take place. Smart business analysts and project managers will step up to take on these entrepreneurial roles in organizations.

Business analysis as designer There has long existed a gap between requirements and physical design. A Business Analyst has been rather ‘away’ from the realistic design that a client may need more, than just requirement elicitation and a high level solution. Many Organizations have started providing logical design as an output via BA and are shrinking that gap to create better products faster. Multiple tools like business process maps, use case , prototypes etc. can be used to enhance productivity.

It’s been seen that   many organizations have not supported the design capabilities of business analysis. We need to exploit the deeper strength of business analysis to open this box of talent which incubates from the way a BA operates with his stakeholders and accumulates knowledge

Distributed governance. Organizations will have to find the fulcrum point of balance between the entropy of the projects and project governance. We have seen  centralized project governance  such as PMOs now  giving way to a more distributed governance, with many organizations leaving it to the  individual project teams decide how much governance is reqd. It is evident that in the future organizations will take a more balanced approach and apply more governance for certain types of projects and less for others.